


_Femme Fatale

by glenarvon



Series: _Brilliancy [25]
Category: Watch Dogs (Video Game)
Genre: Blackmail, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mild Gore, Organized Crime, Social engineering, reader discretion advised
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-08 18:25:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5508152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glenarvon/pseuds/glenarvon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's time for the Chicago South Club to go down for good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning:** Brachial stuns are no joke, don't try this at home, kids. This thing is the Vulcan nerve pinch.  
>  **Author's Note:** I re-read Dark Clouds and realised I needed to do something with the Quinns and the Club. Lucky's mentioned to have several sons so... I'm deciding he has two, because I'm not creative enough to come up with enough plot for more.

[this takes place in 2018]

* * *

The slaughterhouse sprawled around them, eerily silent after the gunshots had died, darkened corridors lit only by faint white emergency lights connecting large, empty halls with each other. They'd been cleaned, of course, but it was too easy to imagine the subtle stench of gallons of fresh blood running away through the grills in the floor. They snapped at her heels as she ran over them, treacherously hidden from sight.

The only sound were their footsteps and fast breathing. She'd shook Iain's hand from her arm after he'd used his hold to propel her through the door. It was easier to run without being so close and bumping into each other.

She'd brought four bodyguards and Iain to the meet, a sufficient show of strength to back up negotiations without seeming to overcompensate. It wasn't good enough for a fight, though. One of her bodyguards had been taken out before everything even began, when the smart-watch on his wrist exploded. The force hadn't been able to sever his hand completely, but it had still ripped and burned his flesh to the bone, rendering him useless for the fight that followed and leaving him permanently maimed even if he survived.

Blood had sprayed into her face only a moment later, where a bullet had punched through another man's neck while they all still stood there dumbfounded. She'd never known Iain had reflexes like that, reacting faster than any of them, she guessed he'd saved her life, though she wasn't so confident he'd get to take it home.

She didn't usually conduct her business meetings in places like this. She preferred the villas and lofts owned by the family, the luxury spas and hotels. Not halfway dismantled slaughterhouses of a recently bankrupted company.

They didn't have the same hold over Blume they used to, not after all of Lucky's precious secrets were spilled all over the internet for everyone to see, but they still had means. _People_ worked at Blume, and people had vices and weaknesses. All you needed was to find out what they wanted or dreaded most, then offer or threaten it in the right tone of voice.

This deal, however, had been difficult to resist and demanded a delicate touch. Her facts _had_ been sound, she knew as much, she was no beginner, so she could only conclude the vigilante hadn't engineered all of it from scratch, he had probably just pounced on it at some later date. It was hard to figure out what his limits were, but she supposed he'd sign her assessment of people and how to use them. If it was true for Blume employees, it was equally true for Chicago South Club members, no matter how carefully they were selected.

The drivers were with the cars, but she had no illusions about their ability to help her. She needed to get away from this place and perhaps that was the only good thing about the remoteness. Pearce had never seemed to acquire many allies, perhaps his personality didn't agree with them, he was alone to do the hunting and the slaughterhouse was large and dark…

Iain had his gun out, but he was her secretary and though he was in good shape, but she doubted he could protect her anybetter than she could protect herself. Which, given the vigilante's track record wasn't going to mean much on either count.

She herself had a gun in its holster under her arm, a small revolver that suited her more than she knew how to use it. She'd never had much of a talent for it, but it made a good enough image for the wife of the current head of the Quinn family.

"Through here!" Iain shouted and ran through a metal double door that swung sluggishly open. The room beyond was large, it's corners lost in the dark. Only a handful of lights somewhere above, giving only a vague indication of its dimensions. Large meat hook caught the light dully, all lined up above a conveyer belt. Now there was an even better image, she thought, the vigilante gutted and left to bleed out, begging for his life if the pain hadn't left him too broken to even speak.

Perhaps she indulged in that violent fantasy for a split second too long or perhaps it made no difference. She caught the movement on the left, something more solidly black than the surrounding, but she had no time to even open her mouth to shout a warning. Pearce melted from the shadows and even that instant was enough to drive home just how much taller and bigger he was than Iain. And he was faster, too, silently and letting the darkness work for him. The element of surprise and the utter absence of hesitation. Iain barely managed to snap around and bring his gun up before Pearce was on him. There were no weapons in Pearce's hands, he simply slapped the gun the side and stepped in close to Iain, dropped his other arm down on the nape of his neck so hard, even she — doomed to do nothing but watch — thought she felt the force of it. Iain collapsed with a thin sound of pain escaping him.

Perhaps she should have used the time she'd been given, rather than admire the vigilante's apparent skill she should have drawn back more than just a step and ran, or drawn her own gun, or both. There had been an opening when the vigilante was focussed on Iain and at this distance, she doubted she'd have missed.

It never mattered, because Pearce didn't even wait before Iain had gone still on the floor before he whipped around. A quick, long-legged step brought him within reach of her and he caught her wrist before her fingers had even settled properly on the gun. She felt the leather of his gloves on her and the steely strength of his grip. He pushed her back until her back hit the wall and then snapped her captured hand back into the tiles, so hard a pained yelp escaped her and her fingers opened of their own, letting the gun clatter uselessly to the ground.

She kicked out with her legs, anything to destablise him, but she could bring enough force to bear, felt her heel slip past his leg without even making him shudder. She flailed her free arm around, aimed a balled fist for the side of his face only to have him deflect the blow easily. She yanked her knee up, but all it did was ruin her own balance and he spun her around with it and her face and body hit the tiles, driving the breath from her.

Snarling, she blindly reached behind her, clawing at whatever she could grip. She was perfectly fine with ripping off an ear if she could get a hold…

"Stop," he hissed close by her ear, voice slightly muffled. "Or I'll hurt you."

"Do your worst!" she snarled and struggled harder, though he didn't even flinch. The pain in her arm spiked sharply, overextended and for a moment she thought he'd simply snap it off. The wall in her face was unrelenting and Pearce's solid body behind her wasn't much better. She snarled again but then forced her body to go still. As satisfying as violence was, she didn't like to be on the receiving end. If he'd wanted her dead, he wouldn't have to just hold her like this, after all. And if he _didn't_ want her dead, she had something else he wanted.

Sensing her compliance, Pearce eased up just enough so the pain receded to a dull threat. He caught her other hand and gathered both her wrists over her back, used his free hand to slip down her side, pushed away the edge of her blazer, his finger tips skimmed the edge of her breast as he passed over the empty gun holster, then down over her hips, dipped briefly between the junction of her thighs. He shifted his grip to his other hand, patted her down again.

She hissed a winded curse at him over the forced intimacy of his touch. If he'd done his homework, he'd know she had no other weapons. She didn't dare resume her struggles, however, in case he remembered to make good on his earlier threat and it didn't seem worth it. At least, his touch was too efficiently impersonal to serve any form of private gratification.

"I have an offer for you," he asked calmly. "You gonna listen?"

She snorted, but then took a deep breath and said, "What choice do I have? Yes, I'll listen."

Pearce hesitated for a moment longer than she had expected, she wasn't sure what he'd read in her tone other than weary exasperation, but perhaps he just was a paranoid bastard. In a way, if he weren't, the Club or the cops or any of the dozen other enemies he'd made would have dismembered him ages ago. An unexpected wave of relief flooded her when finally let go entirely and stepped back from her, she heard the quiet footsteps, a harsher scrape of metal on the floor, then another. He had kicked both dropped guns away in the darkness somewhere.

She turned around slowly, dropped her arms, winced at the burning in her strained muscles. Pearce remained a black presence against the more diffuse dark of the room. Sometimes an occasional snatch of hard white light glinted off the meat hooks, distracting her attention.

She let her gaze trail past him to Iain's prone body.

"Is he dead?" she asked and forced herself to sound as neutral as she could.

Pearce turned his head to glance down, then took a step to the side so he could poke him with the tip of his boot. Iain groaned and tried to roll away, but seemed to lack the coordination or presence of mind to do anything else.

She took her gaze away from him and back to Pearce. He'd put both hands into the pockets of his coat, no visible signs of weapons on him and in truth, he seemed insufferably relaxed, taking his time before he spoke again.

"You were hard to figure out," he said conversationally. "I couldn't figure out why the Club wasn't going down. Niall didn't have it and Kenneth certainly doesn't. He's a trust fund kid, no notable skill, no leadership qualities. I wasted a lot of time looking into him."

She caught herself clenching her teeth and stopped, staring into the darkness where his eyes would be, wondering if he'd be more readable in bright daylight, when his expression was laid bare.

He'd paused, watched her and she felt the scrutiny and let it push against her for a moment longer.

"Oh, you want me to _say_ something, I thought I was just supposed to listen."

Pearce tilted his head a little in the gesture of a vaguely amused predator. "I got an offer," he said then. "I won't let the Chicago South Club return to old glories, not on my watch. But you know better than I the structure you built on, that's hard to take out all at once. I can kill someone, or get them in jail, or ruin their business. Bad for you, risky for me, but nothing changes. But you? You know everything about the Club. In a few minutes, the cops will show up, a weapons' deal gone bad. You didn't think I'd let you sell weapons to a terrorist cell, did you?"

"I think you're stretching yourself thin," she remarked, matching his casual tone, if his poise was out of her league for now.

He made a sound that could almost have been the beginning of a laugh, too short and too dry to be sure of it.

"I made sure the right cops get to handle your case. You tell them everything, you testify in court and the Club gets dismantled. You get off easy and go into witness protection."

She shook her head, "You're mad," she said and it was her turn to laugh at the absurdity of it.

He shrugged. "Or," he said in the same calm tone. "You take the fall for the Club. I know you got your deals with the DA's office, I know you think you'll get away with a slap on the wrist, but you won't. I'll spill everything I have on you, a whole year's worth of large-scale organised crime. You know what happens when that hits the net?"

"They'll give me my very own movie deal?"

This time, he did laugh, though it was still short and abrasive. "Public pressure will be massive. Acquitting you would be career suicide."

The humour had been fleeting from the start and she didn't much feel like laughing. She didn't think he'd be swaying so easily, bonding with her over a few clever exchanges. In truth, she felt her mood darken as his plan slowly sank in.

"That's the offer?" she asked. "Sell out the Club or go to jail?"

"Jail, yeah, well," he said thoughtfully. "Do you expect to enjoy it there? With your Club connection, could be a walk in the park."

He shrugged and she saw him turn his head, look down at Iain again. "Of course, you may be the de-facto leader of the Club, you're stilling running the show under your husband's name, even if he's just a figurehead. All he needs to do is kick you out."

She had a witty remark for that, but she already knew where he was going.

"And he'll kick you out if you damage his reputation. By, say, cheating on him with your secretary."

He paused, looked back at her and shrugged again. "Secrets," he said disdainfully. "Better not have them."

"What about yours? What dirty secrets are _you_ hiding?" she demanded as icy anger pushed up her throat. "I _bet_ they'll break you. It's just a question of time until someone does." She bared her teeth. "I'd _love_ to be that person."

But he knew she had nothing, her play was improvised and he'd watched for weeks or months or whatever long it took him to set all of this up. His shadow was visibly unimpressed by her threat, he only tilted his head a little more, waiting and not saying anything more.

She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him.

"So you think I'll just roll over and do what you tell me to?" she snapped. "You think I'm that weak?"

"No, I think you're that smart."

She laughed in his face.

"You're Heather Quinn, born Heather Juliet Mullen," Pearce said in the same casual tone he'd started using when he was done threatening her. "Glasswood youth, high school dropout, some minor infractions with drugs and prostitution. I took you for Kenneth Quinn's trophy wife at first."

She narrowed her eyes at him and said nothing. That was the image she'd painstakingly created and maintained, especially since Niall died. Safer for her, better for Kenneth and the Club. Everybody wins.

"You aren't a Quinn, not by birth anyway. Don't give me any bullshit about loyalty, you used Kenneth and you used the Club. It's time to walk away while you can."

"Shouldn't you want to kill _me_ , if the Club's mine?" she mocked.

"Who says I don't?" he asked back and it didn't just sound like a line he'd recite, but what made it truly frightening was the lack of passion in his voice, as if death was nothing. If he had wanted her dead, of course they wouldn't be having this conversation and she'd grudgingly admit his assessment of her wasn't all wrong. She understood the nature of the threat he was making well enough. If she didn't do what he wanted, he would make sure she went to prison and he had the means to make her life a living hell there. It'd be messy, his manipulations facing off against the strings the Club could pull for her — or those loyal to her at any rate. She'd be in the middle of it. If he played it right, he could drive a wedge in Club politics and seriously hurt them, even if she refused his plan.

"I want the Club destroyed," Pearce added. "Think fast, the cops will be here any minute."

"What happens then?" she demanded. "You destroy the Club and it's free ponies for everyone? Somebody else will just take our place. You want the Russian mafia back in Chicago? Is that better? So what's the point?"

He tilted his head to the side a little and an errant sprinkle of light seemed to catch his eyes for an instant before he shifted away again.

"Not your concern. Make up your mind."

In the silence that followed, she heard the distant sound of police sirens, cutting through her thoughts. She looked away from Pearce and into the darkness, became aware again of the disgusting taste of metal in her mouth from the blood.

On the ground, Iain groaned and rolled on his stomach, tried to pull himself up to his hands and knees. She didn't know how much of the conversation he'd heard, but she knew she could trust him.

Still fixed on where Pearce's face was, she knew he'd set his trap well. He'd got her alone, given her no time to think things through so she could discover whatever loopholes he'd been unable to patch. She needed _time,_ work something out to get out of this, but she needed him to believe her.

"It's not going to work," she pointed out, stabbed an accusing finger at him. "Come on, everyone I can sell to the cops, you already know who they are. Don't you? You know everything. You could just burn them out."

He grunted. "Like I said, it's not so easy. It's a power structure keeping the Club going. It's hundreds of people in key positions. I take one down, another takes his place. I take _ten_ down, it's the same bullshit. But you and the cops… you take them all down, one stroke. I can cleanup whoever gets away. It'll be a purge."

"You _are_ mad," she said again. "You know that, don't you?"

"That's not an answer."

"I could just keep you here talking," she said, just to be spiteful. "Cops show up and it's the end of you."

He snorted and didn't answer, but the sirens were fairly close by now, one or two streets away at most. They'd need a little time to get a good grasp on the place's layout, they'd move slow, too, depending on what report Pearce had fed them.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, took a few steps. Opened her eyes again and looked at him.

"If I do this, the Club will come for me. They have more cops on their payroll than you think, trust me on this." She pointed at him again. "You need to protect me, before, during and after the trial. You. It's your responsibility and it's my fucking life."

She saw him pause, but then nod his head, he still sounded amused. "You think I was planning to let you out of my sight?"

"Not good enough," she said, took a step forward, then another until she was close enough to touch him if she reached out. She saw a faint glint where his eyes were, the line where his mask rested on the bridge of his nose.

"I want your promise. I want you to promise me you'll protect me," a tiny shiver came into her voice and she swallowed it down immediately.

"You got it," he said and he still sounded casual about it, he'd dropped that pretence of humour he'd used before.

She took another breath, felt it shake at the back of her throat as she exhaled.

"All right, I'll do it," she forced out. "But it's all on you."

"Good," he said. "Come 'here."

She didn't have time to react, because he reached out and gripped her again, dragged her along to the other side of the door where several pipes came out of the wall only to vanish into the floor. He pulled her arms forward so they were aligned with the pipe, then wrapped a zip tie around both, pulled tight until she felt the plastic bite into her skin.

"Asshole," she snarled as she pulled experimentally on the pipe, but found that there was no give at all.

He chuckled and stalked over to where Iain was still struggling to get back to his feet. Pearce reached out and got a hold of his arm, yanked him up.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

"He's useless to me if he gets locked up," Pearce pointed out. "He's insurance, remember?"

She clamped her teeth closed and said nothing, watched as Pearce dragged Iain with him through the double doors they'd come through before. The doors swung back and forth in their wake, but she heard nothing else. The sirens had stopped moving and she guessed they were parked outside now, at least four of them, by the sound of them. Not enough cops to close the place down quickly, more than enough time for Pearce to slip away undetected.

Cursing, she pulled her bound hands again and hissed at the pain and futility of it, stamped her foot when the pipe and the zip ties held. No doubt she could work herself free eventually, but not before the cops found her.

* * *

Iain huddled miserably in the passenger seat. Sometimes, he'd bring his arm up and slide it along his neck, but didn't seem to dare put any pressure in it. He hadn't put up much of a fight and it rankled, even if he'd known to expect it. The chase through the dark slaughterhouse had pumped adrenaline through his system, but it seemed a thin layer of protection against the cold, hard truth he was faced with.

"That wasn't necessary," he muttered. "I still feel weird."

Pearce didn't even glance at him. He hadn't pulled the mask from his face and the shadow from his cap covered his eyes, keeping him hidden even against the brightness of the city lights outside.

"You were going to shoot me," Pearce said.

Iain frowned. "You know I aim for shit."

"I don't believe in luck," Pearce said, unimpressed and in a tone of voice that put an end to this part of the discussion. Iain had enough sense to shut up about it. He dropped his hand away from his neck and sighed.

"I'm so fucked," he muttered.

Pearce chuckled a little, not mockingly but Iain still didn't appreciate it. He send him a hard stare, though all he saw of Pearce's face in profile was dark against dark, impenetrable.

"If you must sleep with the boss, don't do it in front of a cam, you never know who's watching."

"No, actually," Iain said a little louder. "I'm learning that some creep is _always_ watching. I think in the end doesn't matter who. If it's you, or Blume or DedSec." He snorted and added, "And where's _no_ camera anyway?"

He squared his shoulders into the seat and sat up a little straighter as he collected himself. "Can't believe you blackmailed her with the same thing."

Pearce glanced at him, but still said nothing, letting the silence drop in the car like a coffin lid.

After a while, Iain asked, "What happens next?"

"You go home," Pearce said simply.

"What do I tell the Club?"

"The truth, obviously. Terrorists didn't show up, but I did and killed everyone, didn't finish you. You saw the cops arrive and ran. You don't know what happened to Heather, they'll figure it out soon enough."

"She wasn't joking, you know," Iain said. "Kenneth Quinn… he's not the pushover you think."

Pearce took a finger from the wheel, aimed it vaguely at Iain. " _You_ saidHeather was the once in charge. I found nothing that contradicts it. You gave her to me, don't forget that."

Iain rubbed his face with a hand, shook his head again like he was trying to get rid of unwanted thoughts. "I gave you nothing," Iain muttered. "Nothing you didn't take."

"Iain…" Pearce began, somewhat softer than before. "Don't worry, I stand by our deal. I stand by the promise I made her. But you've _got_ to trust me. Heather plays ball, she'll get through it. And if you don't fuck up your act with the Club, they have no reason to distrust you."

"And the witness protection? I have nothing to offer, I won't make it, so when they move her away…"

"Come on, Iain, you want to ride into the sunset with Heather? I'll make it happen."

"I heard that database is hard to crack…" Iain started.

"I _heard_ I'm kind of good at this. Relax. Seriously."

Iain looked at Pearce again and clenched his lips together in a failed smile. "Not like I got a choice."

Pearce didn't answer, but tilted his head a little in agreement.

They drove for a while in silence until Pearce took the car from the busy street and around narrower and emptier corners until he parked behind a dark-grey cube of a building with an unhappy, flickering 'motel' sign shedding sickly light.

"That's your stop," Pearce said and Iain shook himself awake.

"Where are we?"

"South end of the Loop, looks worse than it is. ctOS blind spot, at least this week. They're upgrading the hardware. You're good the entire block."

Iain caught himself frowning before he realised what had changed to cause it. Pearce had pulled down the mask and muffling was gone from his rough voice, though it served only to make him seem less forgiving.

Iain climbed from the car and was hit unexpectedly by the damp cold, a slow stirring of uncomfortable air all around him. He heard the busy streets not far away and couldn't help but glance up to seek out the ctOS cameras in the dark above.

"You'll call?" Iain asked, put a hand on the open door and leaned down to catch a glimpse of Pearce.

"If there's something I need, sure," Pearce said.

"About Heather," Iain clarified. "She's important to me."

Pearce had already drawn back and Iain got the impression Pearce would drive off even if he didn't let go of the car. They'd been in contact for over half a year and though Iain didn't exactly like his blackmailer, Pearce wasn't as difficult as he'd expected. Iain thought it must be something like Stockholm's, but Pearce _had_ listened to him about Heather and Kenneth Quinn and the Club. He didn't seem like someone who'd fuck them over just because he could. That _had_ to count for something.

"I get it," Pearce said with just a hint of impatience. "But contact is risky. I'll let you know what you need to know."

Iain flexed his hand on the car, but finally relented and stepped back, slammed the door shut and watched the car drive off. He was feeling cold to his bones, tired and sore, less from the beating and more from the emotional strain. At least, this whole thing had finally gone into the last round and he could hope for an ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Insert usual self-depreciating comment here. This is writing with writer's block, I'm tired of waiting for it to improve, but hey, it's Christmas and it's the thought that counts, right?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It doesn't quite look like it, but I actually managed to meet my own deadline for this chapter (three days ago) but proofreading revealed that I practically needed to rewrite most of it. What have I got myself into?  
>  **Recurring character:** Vincent Fisher has appeared in Loose Ends before. Mia Perez has appeared in Sucker's Game, but this takes place before she was contacted by Cox, in case you're worrying about that.

Mia Perez stood for a moment on the overgrown concrete of the backyard. A narrow street ran along the back of the houses here, just wide enough for a car, but it didn't see much traffic, judging by the vegetation creeping from the badly kept gardens outward. She glanced down on her phone to make sure she was in the right place, then shrugged. The house, like others in the row, was a four story building and a couple of decades old, judging by the style. From the front, they looked representable enough, but back here, it was all abandoned trash cans and trashed furniture.

An old car was propped up on bricks, its wheels long gone and the interior left to rot. Mia eyed it as she walked past and down a few steps to the semi-basement and into the shadow in front of the door. A massive cable went through the wall there, but before she could turn and look where the cable was coming from, the low metallic sound of the door unlocking pulled her attention back.

Pearce opened and gave her a quick smile.

"Come in," he said and stepped aside.

The short narrow hallway just beyond the door was mostly in darkness before it opened into a surprisingly spacious living room. At least, if this had still been a normal apartment, it would've been a living room. Pearce must have rented the place fully furnished, but had piled most of the furniture up against the back of the room, where Mia spotted several armchairs and couch tables as well as empty planters and sloppily packed and staked boxes. Most of the remaining tables and shelves now housed Pearce's computer set-up and the accumulated debris of someone who couldn't be bothered to keep house.

"Wow," Mia said, glancing over the equipment, following some of the larger cables where they followed the outline of the room, she spotted the cable coming through the wall by the door and connect to the rig in a mess of loose wires.

Behind her, Pearce locked the door and closed the metal gate he'd installed on the inside.

"Did you bring food?" Pearce asked and Mia held out the white plastic bag she held in one hand.

Pearce snatched it and put it on the desk, digging through the contents.

"How long have we known each other?" he asked.

"Two months and a couple of days," she said, not sure if she should be precise about it, but somewhat glad Pearce wasn't even watching her. He had dug into her plastic bag, retrieved a bag of fries and a double hamburger.

"You ready?" he asked and sat down on the table, pulled a leg up on his chair to balance the hamburger's box and take a hearty bite.

"Ready?" Mia repeated. "Ready for what?"

Burger in one hand, Pearce reached behind himself with the other and pulled up a tablet, he tapped on it and the room behind Mia brightened.

Confused, she didn't react immediately. Pearce reached out, gripped her arm and tugged her a step aside.

The projector she'd blocked threw its image on the wall. Pictures of people, some mugshots, others candids taken clearly without the people knowing about them. There were shots from the news or social media. It was too much to take it all in, so Mia only registered only random elements. A woman with bleached-blonde hair, a young man with a bright red tattoo that made him look like his throat had been slashed, a man with a large rifle standing over a killed deer.

"What…?"

"You're looking at the Chicago South Club," Pearce said around the burger.

Mia followed some of the connections with her eyes, recognised the man in the designer clothes on top of the projection as Kenneth Quinn. He didn't look like a mobster, more like a hipster if anything, lavishing on some penthouse terrace with a view of both the lake and the city behind him.

"I still don't have everything," Pearce said. "But it's going to be enough." He tabbed on the tablet. "Eight days, Heather Quinn, Kenneth's wife, was arrested. She's been in a safe-house, being debriefed by the EADA, Timothy Ramsey, and his team. He's an expert on organised crime, no dirty secrets I could find on him. He's a good man for the job."

"No dirty secrets," Mia snorted.

"He smokes weed on weekends," Pearce said without missing a beat. "But he's not corrupt and that's what matters. Heather's going to give him… something like this," Pearce pointed at the projection. "Probably more detailed."

He took another bite while he zoomed in on the picture of an attractive young woman with bright blue eyes and an artificial smile.

"You got the mob boss's wife to sell him out?" Mia asked.

"Better," Pearce said, chuckled a little. "Kenneth and Heather have a different arrangement. He's just a figurehead, but he seems okay with that. He gets the prestige and the respect. She gets to give the orders and make sure nothing goes wrong. Keeps the traditionalists in the Club happy and the money coming in. They've rebuilt significantly since Niall's death. Made peace with the Militia, got back with the Viceroys. They are even rebuilding some of their human trafficking operations. The Club had some bad blood with Blume, but some of the Club-owned IT startups are working fine with Blume."

He tabbed through the information as he spoke. "Taking the Club apart is something I can't do alone, but Heather Quinn can. These people are the heads that need to be chopped off, but there's a whole system backing them. Heather's testimony is one of the few that can take it all apart, because she knows almost everything."

Interspersed by taking bites off the burger, Pearce scrolled through several people's mugshots and candids.

He said, "John Heng has become the Quinn's business manager. Now he's interesting because in college he was in the same fraternity as Joseph DeMarco and Peter Madison."

"DeMarco's dead," Mia said. "But I know Madison." She couldn't quite place him, though.

Pearce smirked a little. "He's CIO of Kessler Co., a local weapons manufacturer and dealer." He pulled up a picture of a muscular man in an expensive suit. "Madison is friends with Joe Walker, who is a leader in the Pawnee Militia. He's a special forces veteran, but I haven't gotten to his files yet. Which brings us to Carl Herrick."

Herrick turned out to be the man Mia had spotted earlier, with the slashed-throat-tattoo.

"Also special forces, also no accessible files. Herrick is twenty years younger than Walker, I don't know if they knew each other," Pearce said, growled a little. "The military angle isn't paying off yet. I have someone looking into it, but I'm not sure much will come of it."

He paused and seemed to consider Herrick. "His role isn't clear. He's definitely the muscle and he's the one keeping the gangs in line. He doesn't have a lot of connections within or outside the Club, he's more of a lone wolf, makes him dangerous."

"You think you couldn't take him?" Mia asked, it was a joke but Pearce merely nodded.

"I'd shoot him in the head from half a mile away," he said. "That's the only way I'll take him."

Mia frowned, but didn't know how to comment, so she turned back to the problem.

"The Militia, maybe?" Mia offered. "Military types are attracted to them."

"Yeah, could be," Pearce said, but didn't sound convinced. "But the Militia is a problem I'm getting to." He paused, then picked up the thread again. "Arthur Campbell has been with Lucky for over thirty years. He's a lawyer, a good one, got a whole army of other good lawyers to roll out whenever a Club boss needs help."

Pearce changed the projection again, focussed on the woman with the bleached hair Mia had spotted before. The zoomed-in picture revealed her to be much older Mia had thought, at least in her fifties and looking slender and elegant.

Pearce continued, "This is Victoria Vanna, not her real name. Jumped into the breach after the trafficking ring blew up, kept what was left from falling apart. She used to be close to both Lucky and Niall, but the relationship to Heather seems a bit cold. Vanna's the 'meat manager' in the Club. Dancers, strippers, hookers, escorts, male or female, she finds them. She's also running the Miroire modelling agency. They got a pretty good reputation."

"Shit, I know someone who signed a contract with them," Mia said. "Do you think I should warn her?"

"No, Miroire is mostly a front, they treat their signed models well, it's the informal employees you should worry about."

"Meat manager," Mia muttered to herself and pulled a grimace, but Pearce only shrugged. He scrunched up the now empty burger box and set it aside, he reached into the bag to retrieve a handful of fries.

"Her term," he said. "The Club's human trafficking operation went up in flames a few years ago, but it's been growing again. There's always some sick fuck willing to buy a human being, so there's a market. The operations are run mostly out of The Qube, a semi-legit nightclub in Mad Mile. The place is managed by Teddy Mahoney, himself the son of an old family friend and Lucky's personal doctor. His right hand is this guy: Vincent Fisher. He used to run a few underground brothels under Quinn, fell out with the Club and went freelance for a while. I put him behind bars a few years ago, but he's out on parole and diving right back in. Fisher's a sadist, if no one else's got to go, he does."

He looked rather harmless to Mia's eyes, not unattractive at first glance. She looked back at Pearce again, searching for clues to what he was thinking, but his face had turned to stone. He shook himself free of his own thought, however dark they might have been.

"And then we have Gerry Mackey. Used to be a small scale con man, habitual gambler, calls himself a financial advisor, but since the fallout after Niall's death, Mackey's in charge of virtually all the Club's finances."

"I…" Mia started when Pearce fell silent. "I'm not sure I got all of that."

A slight smile broke through the mask of Pearce's face when he met her gaze. "Don't worry."

He lifted the tablet he'd been using. "It's all here. I have to take care of something, and I want you here, keeping an eye on things. I don't expect any trouble, but this setup isn't portable."

He turned off the projection and put the tablet down, fished a handful of fries from the bag. "If you get bored, read up on it. The tablet doesn't go online. In fact, it's best if you don't mess with any network settings."

"Even to improve them?" Mia asked with a chuckle.

"I'm open to suggestions," he said doubtfully. He pointed with a fry at the thick cable Mia had noticed earlier. "A ctOS centre is just a street away and that's my link. I have no surveillance in the safe-house where Heather is, they do regular sweeps and I don't want to scare them, _but_ they back up everything to the server farm up in Pawnee. In other words, we get regular updates too."

"Blume should know about it," Mia said. "The moment you touched the cable."

"Yeah," Pearce said. "Currently the alert is being suppressed, but sometime someone will look at the logs and see what's going on. I got a backup ready to go when that happens, don't worry."

He found some bunched up paper napkins at the bottom of the bag and wiped his hands.

"Questions?" he asked.

"You're actually trusting me with… all of this?"

"I'm actually trusting you with all of this," Pearce said earnestly. He angled his head as he added, "That's bathroom, that's kitchen, don't touch the beer while you're working."

He pushed himself off the table and strode across the room. "I got to get changed," he said and vanished through a third door.

Left alone for the moment, Mia took the chance to look around the place again. She'd seen some of Pearce's hideouts before, but this was by far the most sophisticated setup she'd seen. Judging from just the pieces she could see at a glance, it was also worth a fortune in hardware alone and who knew what all the collected information was going to be worth. Pearce was going to war. And apparently he thought she was good enough to take along.

She caught sight of herself mirrored in some of the darkened screens along the back and realised she was grinning like an idiot at the realisation.

Taking a deep breath and walked over to the chair and sat down slowly, rolled it to the desk and let her hand hovered reverently over the keyboard.

"Don't mess it up, kid," Pearce said from the bedroom doorway.

"No pressure, eh?" she grimaced and Pearce chuckled. He had changed into a dark hoodie and foregone his usual leather coat in favour of a shorter jacket. It didn't hide the gun-holster nearly as well, but by the way he'd bulked up slightly, it was doing a better job about the bulletproof vest he was wearing.

"Something goes wrong, you call," Pearce said. On the way to the door, he picked up two bags from the floor and slung them both over his shoulder.

"Yeah, I will," she said, thought about it and added, "How do I know what's supposed to happen and what isn't?"

"Nothing should happen," Pearce said. "Heather had a headache, Ramsey went home an hour ago and she's in her safe-house. There's a schedule for her protective detail, including their names. There are no cameras inside, but you can spot them coming and going. It's labelled in the system, you'll find it. Anything weird, you keep it in sight and you call me ASAP."

"I can do that," Mia said.

"I know," Pearce said seriously. "I should be back in a few hours."

He used his phone to unlock the door and left.

* * *

An hour later, Pearce sat in his parked car at the far end of the large, sprawling car-park between several industrial plants. The port wasn't far and if Pearce had been looking up instead of down on his phone, he could have seen its lights hang above the horizon in the twilight gloom of late afternoon.

The ctOS cameras moved lazily on their poles above, but there were large gaps in their surveillance pattern. Pearce suspected some other hacker's work in it, but found no other trace of anyone else in the system. He considered adjusting the pattern, but eventually didn't. He didn't need the additional intel and it was better if his presence on the parking lot wasn't recorded at all.

He cycled through the camera feeds anyway and when he spotted the jeep turning into the car-park, he used the camera to zoom in and let Profiler check through the three men. Profiler spewed out the details, but his quick search turned up nothing he didn't already know or expect. All three had records, two of them hate-crime related and the third seemed to have just concocted a better story. In many ways, their social media was more damning, online they were honest about where they stood politically.

Pearce picked up three smartphone signals from the jeep. Two of them were decently protected, nothing he couldn't crack, but he wasn't sure he felt like expanding the energy, especially when the third had gone without patching for a while. He installed a backdoor, watched the status bar for a moment to be sure nothing threw an error, then pocketed the phone as he got out of the car.

A slow drizzle was falling, painting a treacherous glint across the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. Pearce pulled the hoodie up and narrowed his eyes against the unexpected sting.

At this moment, he was aware of nearly forty terrorist cells in Chicago. They spanned the whole spectrum, from far right to far left, religious, environmental, cyber-anarchist, black, white and any colour and ethnicity in between. He suspected there were more, the truly smart ones who never showed up on his radar because they never used a phone at all. He dealt with them the same way he was forced to deal with most threats he encountered, he prioritised. He couldn't monitor them all, or take them out. What he _could_ do was make sure their existence became known. He uploaded their secrets to SystemLeaks, got them to DedSec, or other watch dog organisations, he used anonymous tip-lines and sometimes he got more involved and made sure the tips were taken seriously.

But Louis Walker and his cell had crossed his path at just the right time. Louis was Militia leader Joe Walker's son, but Louis had had fallen out with the Militia. They weren't radical enough for Louis' taste, they weren't doing enough. Louis didn't see himself as a criminal, in his mind he was a freedom fighter. He still kept in loose contact, but Pearce was fairly certain the Militia was unaware of what Louis did.

Louis parked the jeep a good distance away and got out with one of his comrades, while the other slipped forward to take the driver's seat.

Watching the two men approach, Pearce reached into his jacket for the small pack of cigarillos. He gave the sky a resigned glare, lit up and waited. If he'd left it to CPD, or even Blume's incomplete crime detection software, this group wouldn't be caught before they did some massive damage. Two birds with one stone, he'd enjoy taking them down.

"You got it?" Louis called when they stopped a few yards away. After their deal with Heather and the Club had fallen through, they'd been spooked and it had taken some manoeuvring on Pearce's part to make them willing to trust an unknown source.

Pearce nodded, "Sure," he said, but didn't move. "You got the money?"

Louis glared at Pearce. He was a tall man, remarkably muscled and clearly used to intimidate the people around him. Pearce had seen some of the man's fighting moves, though, and he wasn't worried.

After a moment, Louis clenched his teeth and made a sharp gesture with his head to his comrade. He held a small paper bag and at the gesture, he pulled it open, held it down so Pearce could see the rolled up bundles of money.

"Okay," Pearce said after a lengthy pause in which he'd peered into the bag. It'd be easy to underpay, but Louis wasn't dumb enough. You shortchanged your contacts in this field and you didn't get very far. He'd been good enough to negotiate with the mob boss herself, even if Pearce had pushed Iain to over-exaggerate the deal's importance to Heather.

Pearce stood up and walked around the car, picked the two bags from the backseat. When he straightened, Louis was standing right behind him, Pearce had seen him approach from the corners of his eyes and wasn't startled. He froze briefly, if only to signal to Louis he knew what was going on, then he stood up straight and tucked on the bags' straps. He took a particularly leisurely drag off the cigarillo and gave Louis a vaguely disinterested once-over, only to look past him. Pearce held his hand out and gestured with two fingers at the other man.

"Money," he said.

"Let me see," Louis demanded. He was close enough Pearce had to tilt his head a little to look into his eyes. Pearce shrugged, took a step back and jostled the bags forward, unzipped one of them and let Louis have a look.

"Now," Pearce said, let his voice drop because Louis being this close was beginning to irritate him and if he just killed him here and now, he'd waste a perfectly good setup.

_"Money,"_ he said sharply.

Louis seemed to think about it, but then relented, nodded and his comrade stepped forward. Pearce took the paper bag and simultaneously let the straps of the bags slip down his arm, he held them out to Louis, who took it and shouldered them.

Pearce took the cigarillo from his mouth and blew out a puff of smoke into the cold air. The two men were already turning to go, though Pearce could tell Louis wanted to say something else.

Pearce bent him a thin smile.

"Don't hurt yourselves, kids," he called after them.

Louis stopped, turned his head at him, waited until his gaze met Pearce's. Louis bared his teeth in a vicious grin, then turned and strode back to his jeep.

Pearce tossed the cigarillo away and waited until the jeep had left the parking lot before he climbed back into his car and checked his phone. He connected to Louis' phone and activated its GPS, send it to the car's centre-stack display.

He knew where Louis and his friends were based, but there was always a chance they had some additional bolt-hole he hadn't found out about. He had to follow them through the city for nearly an hour, partly because traffic was thick this late in the evening and partly because Louis was taking a roundabout route. It seemed an old-school thing to do, ctOS could easily track you on almost any route and if you went somewhere where ctOS _couldn't_ follow you just attracted more attention.

Pearce was glad when Louis finally took the expected turns and made his way from the Wards through Parker Square, past May Stadium and into a more sparsely populated area. The car repair shop Louis used as headquarters had been closed years ago. It had been attached to a gas station, but Pearce had pulled the records and knew the underground tanks had been emptied, otherwise causing an explosion would've been much harder to calculate.

Pearce parked the car a little distance away from the shop and hacked his way through the local cameras until he had a good idea of the surrounding area and the two buildings of the shop itself. Three more men were hanging around the place and Profiler identified them all as members of Louis' group.

Pearce checked again while Louis parked the jeep and joined the others inside. Sometimes teenagers hung around on the edge of the premisses, some gang foot-soldiers being bored, but there was thankfully no one there this evening, no homeless, no hooker, no scurrying rats appeared on Pearce's camera feeds.

Inside, Louis had put the two bags on a workbench and began to slowly unpack them, talking loudly to the others about the deal and his surprisingly favourable opinion of the man who had sold them the bomb components and explosives. Louis thought he might be able to recruit him.

Pearce arched his eyebrows, unimpressed, and put him on mute. He cycled through the cameras one last time, went through the profiles and background checks on Louis' men again, but he didn't expect to find anything that'd change his mind and he was right. If there was scum, he was looking at it.

He dialled up the phones at the bottom of both bags, he'd installed them carefully, hooked them into the explosives in the bag to make sure everything engaged when he detonated. For a moment, the touch of his thumb was too gentle for even the sensitive touchscreen to register, a slow thoughtful motions just out of reach while Louis had no idea at all what was going to happen. Pearce stopped, then stroked his thumb over the screen, saw the small button light up.

The shop went up in a blue-white fireball, the explosion shook the ground in all direction, a small-scale earthquake. It blew out windows on the houses nearest it, crumpled some of the plaster from the more weathered walls and the shockwave flattened the chain-link fence and some of the shrubbery in the area.

Most of the cameras in the garage's immediate vicinity were unresponsive, but Pearce found one a little further down the street to get a good look at the burning mess he'd made. The shop was swallowed up by pitch-black smoke and billowing clouds of dust from the ruptured walls, making it hard to see the actual damage. The jeep had been propelled across the lot and punched into a row of parked cars there, from where he was, Pearce could just make out the wailing of a car alarm. From the black, licks of flames shot high into the frosty sky as the fire consumed with fuel it found.

* * *

"Pearce," Mia greeted him when he walked back into the hideout.

She'd certainly made herself comfortable while he'd been gone. The place smelt of fresh coffee and she was listening to loud music, the beat had already hit him outside the door and he'd heard her sing along badly before she'd stopped at his appearance. Mia reclined in his chair by the desk, one leg up on the table with the tablet in her lap. She had put up a news feed on one of the screens, reporting his terror intervention in Parker Square.

"Turn that down," he said. "There are people on the floor above us."

With his back to her, he couldn't see her expression, but she followed immediately and the music volume dropped to a more comfortable background noise. It became possible to hear the news over it, Pearce caught himself listening for a moment.

_[WKZ News]: An explosion shook Parker Square this afternoon when a house went up in flames and the fire department fought hard to keep the fire from spreading to neighbouring houses. With the fires barely doused, the CPD held a press conference and revealed that at least five men were found dead in the house, one of them has been identified as terror suspect Louis Walker, who has ties to a white supremacist group as well as the paramilitary organisation known as the Pawnee Militia. The police's preliminary investigations indicate that an attempt to build a bomb has spectacularly failed, resulting in the explosion. No others were harmed by the explosion or the fire. Watch the press conference in full, up on our website now._

Mia took her foot down and sat up straight, gave the chair a shove to make it rotate. She watched him for a moment and the apparent interest he had in the news, but when he offered no explanation she didn't ask.

"I noticed something," she said instead, biting her lower lip in preoccupation.

"Let's hear it," Pearce said, looking away from the news.

"I looked through the information and I checked with the protocols of what Heather's giving Ramsey and…" she hesitated. "I don't know, I mean, it's early in the whole thing and I don't really get how it works, but… she's not giving him all the people you pointed out."

Pearce frowned. "Alright, show me."

He took off the jacket and shook out some wet snow before he tossed it in a corner. He leaned his hip into the desk while Mia switched on the projector, quick fingers flitting over the tablet.

"So far, Heather's provided damning information on these people, right? Campbell, Doctor Mahoney, Heng and Vanna."

"Yes," Pearce said, staring at the wall. "They're key."

"There're all Lucky's people, or Niall's."

Pearce gave her a long look. "It's only been a week," he said slowly, but it felt like a stale argument already. He looked away from Mia and back at the wall, going through the records he'd seen and read in that week. He caught himself clenching his teeth.

"Yes, but…" Mia hesitated again, tapped on the tablet. "But not a peep on Mackey, the money guy? Isn't that, like, an important thing?"

Mia gave him a searching look and when he said nothing, she switched the display again. "Nothing on Herrick and if he's in charge of the gangs…"

Her voice dropped a little and she shrugged, a little helplessly. "I mean, if she was just protecting her lover, that'd make sense…but, uhm, to me, it just looks like she's cleaning house."

"It does," Pearce agreed quietly.

"But it's only been a week," Mia repeated meekly.

Pearce shook his head, lips tightened to a thin line. He pushed himself from the table and reached past Mia and turned off the music completely. He gave her an irritable look and Mia scrambled from the chair and Pearce settled down. She hovered behind his right shoulder, still with the tablet in hand, unsure of what to do.

Pearce pulled out his phone, connected it to the rig and hit the dial button.

Only a few moments later, the connection was established. It'd show up as a secure connection from Ramsey's office.

"Hey there," Pearce said congenially. "It's Lloyd, I got some urgent question, boss told me to list them to our special guest so she can think about them until tomorrow, hand me over will you?"

_"Well, damn, it's late, she's already in bed."_

Pearce faked a laugh. "Wake her up, it's not negotiable. I don't get to sleep, she doesn't."

_"I hear you. Wait a sec."_

Mia suppressed snigger. In the pause, she glanced around and withdrew to the couch against the wall. She shoved Pearce's damp jacket aside to sit down.

_"What is it?"_

Pearce's voice dropped back into its wintery growl. He said, "We need to talk. Make something up and go to another room."

There was a short pause, clearly while Heather sorted out her thoughts. When she spoke again, it was already for the benefit of the cops there.

_"Now?"_ she asked indignantly. _"That's a rather intimate topic."_

"Good," Pearce said. There was another pause while Heather left the room. When she spoke again, she nevertheless dropped her voice. She spoke rapidly, barely composed compared to the moment just before.

_"Thank god you called! What the fuck?"_ she demanded. _"You said I'd be safe! But I know one of the men outside_ right now _is on the Club payroll."_

"Ramsey hand-picked the members of his team, I vetted them," Pearce said. "They are all clean."

_"And I tell you, not this one. Yeah, Ramsey. Fuck Ramsey. You've got to get me out of here."_ She stuttered into silence, sounded a little breathless. _"I don't know why they haven't moved yet, but I swear to you the Club knows where I am and it doesn't take a genius to figure out what I'm doing."_

"That's why we need to talk, actually," Pearce said. He felt Mia's gaze on him from behind, studying him.

_"Are you even listening?"_ Heather snapped. _"What do you have if they kill me?"_

"Hmm," Pearce made and said nothing for a moment. "I'm wondering. Because it looks like you're playing another game."

_"I'm not playing anything!"_ she snarled. _"It's just my life on the line, I'm not playing with that!"_

"You're very selective about the information you give up."

Heather was silent, but her shock came through the connection like a tangible wave. When she spoke again, she had forced some strained calm into her voice.

_"All right, you listen to me, you asshole. I've been doing exactly what you want from me, you haven't been keeping your end of the deal. The Club will kill me. And they will do it soon. I can't give Ramsey anything at all if I'm dead. What do I have to do to get it through to you?"_

Pearce said nothing. He looked up when a warning flashed on the screen in front of him. He watched it pensively, he knew how long he had until he needed to disconnect.

"Here's a new deal," he said. "Whatever it is you're doing, you stop. And I'll think about protecting you."

_"Are you serious?"_

"You don't get it. You think I need you, but you're just _convenient_. I have to hang up now. Talk with Ramsey tomorrow, give him everything. Start with Mackey and Herrick."

_"Fuck---"_

Pearce cut the connection before she could finish.

He stapled his fingers in front of his face, stared at the random excerpt of information currently displayed on the screen in front of him. All his work, _months_ of painstaking information gathering and uncounted sleepless nights until he figured out how it all belonged together. The intricate pattern of corruption and shell corporations and tax-evasion trickery and all the clever spiders hidden in their corner of the web. Finding Iain had been a gift, using him to unravel the hierarchy around Kenneth and Heather Quinn had been so promising…

"Pearce?" Mia asked tentatively.

"Shit," he muttered.

He shook himself back into the present, looked at Mia for a moment and her vaguely worried expression. Feeling his attention, she fidgeted a little, saying, "So…uhm…"

He tapped his fingertips against his chin, going over everything again. Heather had always been a calculated risk, he'd suspected she would try to twist the situation in her favour somehow, but he'd hoped he hadn't left her enough room to do much.

Mia still hovered and he realised he needed to take care of her somehow. He squared his shoulders and leaned back in the chair, found a smile for her and said, "Good catch."

"Do you believe her?" Mia asked. "She sounded very spooked."

"I don't know," he said honestly.

"What happens now?"

He'd missed something. Something in the files, something more subtle than what he'd been looking for. Ramsey must have missed it, too and he was arguably more experienced than Pearce himself. If he couldn't Ramsey's team, then Heather might indeed be in danger. She was looking for an advantage, he couldn't blame her, he'd do it, too, in her place. He didn't need to let her have it, though. She was right, though, she was useless to him if the Club managed to take her out before Ramsey could take the prize home.

"For now, we keep going as planned," Pearce said finally as Mia's expectant silence forced itself into his awareness. "I'll go over Ramsey's team, again. If I can find the mole, I can cut them out."

"You need help?"

"Yeah, seems like a second set of eyes comes in useful."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a mention of T-Bone leaving Chicago which is there because I'm trying to forestall potential continuity problems.
> 
> As you can probably tell from my irregular updates, I'm struggling with this whole writing thing these days. This story is going to be far too long, let me know if it gets boring, I almost deleted it instead of writing another part for it…

 

Ramsey's team consisted of over twenty people. All of them with friends, many with family, most with social media activity and a private life. All of them had digital footprints to follow, the trails branching off in all directions. A painstaking puzzle of hit'n'miss, of hacking into ctOS to follow these people through Chicago on the recordings of surveillance and traffic cams. It was sorting through emails and texts and forum entries, it was checking and re-checking browsing histories and medical records, dissecting them for clues.

It shouldn't have been so hard. Heather had quite clearly pointed to one of the two men who had been with her at the time, but both of them came back clean, or clean enough. No one had nothing to hide, Pearce had always known that. In many ways, such things had ceased to matter. Vices, no matter how public or hidden, they were only important if it made the people under their thumb malleable. If Pearce had been looking to turn one of Ramsey's team, he'd have found a dozen different ways to apply pressure and there was no reason to suspect the Club were unable to do the same. It wasn't the point. The point was, nothing in Chicago happened without some kind of digital imprint. They weren't looking for weaknesses to use against these people, they were looking for evidence that somebody else had already done it. And there was nothing, except a few calls to prepaid phones, some late-night hangouts in seedy bars, a stolen car once. Potentially suspicious, but equally likely to be completely innocuous. It didn't _help._

There were many indications that some parts of the Club were _looking,_ they even had sniffed out some of Ramsey's people and started prodding at them, but there was no indication any of them had already broken. For now, Ramsey's team was holding it together and if their most intimate records proved anything, then it was that not everyone always _would_ be turned, even if their circumstances allowed for it. Not everyone was corrupt, not everyone sold out their principles to protect their vices. It was, perhaps, the only good thing to be revealed in the age of big data.

"Pearce?"

But if Ramsey's team wasn't the problem, where was the leak? Heather could've been mistaken, could've been frightened, could've been trying to play him…

"Pearce, hey, wake up."

Cold fingertips touched his shoulder, then gripped and shook him none too gently. He rolled to his back, squinted against the dull glare of the light falling through the door to make out Mia standing over him. She took her hand back.

"There's a blackout," she said. "Around the safe-house where Heather is."

He had been alternating with Mia, sleeping in shifts to keep an eye on Heather and Ramsey and simultaneously going through the data surrounding Ramsey's team. It was too much for two people, Pearce knew that, but he wasn't willing to trust too many people with this. T-Bone didn't need the heat it'd bring and Pearce wasn't even sure where he was since leaving Chicago. T-Bone would come if he called, but Pearce preferred not to drag him back.

"When?" he asked as he slipped to his feet.

"Just now," Mia said and pulled a face. She drew back into the living room. "Do you think I'd sit on that kind of thing?"

When he'd gone to lie down a few hours before, he'd only kicked off his boots and taken off his sweater. It didn't take long to layer the bulletproof vest and sweater back on. He strode back into the living room to retrieve his gun and baton.

He pushed a hand through his tousled hair and stepped up behind Mia, who had returned to the desk.

"No," he said a little belatedly. "'course not. Sorry."

"You'd better be," Mia muttered. She pulled up a map. "The whole area. I already checked, the system's trying to reboot, but it keeps being cancelled. I can't fix it from here, _Blume_ can't fix it. Someone has to go there and do it directly."

"It's a hit," Pearce said and turned away to pick up his coat from the pile on the couch. Snarling, he added, "What did we miss?"

The chair creaked as Mia turned around to watch him, eyes going wide in realisation."You are going out there? You have no idea what's going on!"

Pearce was already by the door, had already unlocked it, pushed the grate aside, but then he stopped, forced a deep breath through clenched teeth. He turned halfway back to her, facing her. He pointed with his finger.

"That's your job. Go through the recordings from right before the blackout. I want you to monitor CPD's communications, I want to know what they're up to. And there should've been chatter before, on the Grid or… _somewhere._ Find it."

"You'll need backup," Mia pointed out and from the way she'd slipped to the very edge of the chair, he could tell she was determined to go with him. She didn't have the training. She was good with a gun, better than she looked at hand-to-hand combat, but the thought of her tagging along just irritated him. She was right, he had no idea what he was walking into, he couldn't know if she could handle it.

"I'll have backup" he said. "But you stay right here, do what I told you."

She wanted to argue, he could tell, but thought better of it before she said something she'd regret. He wasn't sticking around to hear it anyway, hurried to the door and dipped out into the slush-dreary Chicago night.

In the car, he established a connection with Mia first, but unsurprisingly she hadn't been able to turn anything up in the minute since his departure.

The GPS announced it would take him nearly half an hour until her was at the safe-house. Whatever well-orchestrated hit was in progress, it would be long over by then and his entire plan a smoking ruin. He switched his traffic hacks to continuous and hit the gas. This way, all lights and bridges would open the way for him and speed limits weren't a concern.

He shifted his grip on the wheel and went for the phone, send a message, then dialled.

"Jordi? You anywhere near that address?"

 _"Right now?"_ Jordi always sounded like you caught him in a whirlpool with some barely legal hookers, a distinctive combination of laid-back, amused and annoyed. You had to admire his aplomb, though only when there was time for it.

"The Club's trying to assassinate Heather Quinn before she can testify against them. That's the address of her safe-house. There's a blackout there. I'll need fifteen minutes. Can you get there faster?"

Jordi was silent for a long time and there were no background noises to betray what he was doing. Eventually, he said, _"No, but I_ can _get there in fifteen. I could speed it up if you shared your ctOS hacks with me."_

Pearce said nothing.

 _"And let's not talk about that this could've been avoided if you'd shared them with me in the first place. Like a friend should. Pearce?"_ Jordi continued. _"I'm just saying, you want it done, that's the way to go. It's your call."_

Pearce flexed his hand on the wheel, mouthed a silent curse, but then glanced down on his phone to access the hacks. Jordi had wanted them for a long time. There were enough black hat hackers around willing to sell on ctOS, of course. The system had been breached by dozens of hackers on all possible levels, but DedSec were jealously guarding their system hacks and only Pearce himself had T-Bone's expertise to draw on.

"Fine. Don't abuse them," he warned when he send them. 

_"Me? What do you think of me?"_

"I hope you are already on the move," Pearce said darkly, refusing an answer.

_"Naturally."_

Pearce disconnected Jordi. He was in no mood to banter and Jordi didn't need to be told how to handle himself in a situation like the one they were heading into.

He took the Skyway to reach the Loop quickly, focused on the slowly thickening traffic, watching the city skyline come into view ahead of him. The streets were wet here, frosty sludge melted by the heat of the cars and the compressed warmth of the city itself. Treacherous grounds and he felt it in the way the car reacted, he was going too fast, any tiny hitch, any tiny mistake and he could lose control.

"Mia?" he asked after he'd checked they were still connected. He hadn't heard anything from her.

 _"Nothing. I mean, nothing useful,"_ she announced. _"I looked at the cameras, it looks like the blackout was caused by an accident. Well, 'accident' with air-quotes and all. A tanker truck smashed into a building and took it out. Had a ctOS tower on top of it. Blume's trying to reroute the connections to power the area back up."_

"How long?"

_"No idea. Minutes? Blume's average on outages is ten point seven minutes, but this is a bit bigger than the usual problems."_

"What are the cops doing?"

 _"Cops have redundant connections, but they still lost contact with two patrol cars. They were called to a shooting, right outside the safe-house,"_ Mia answered. _"More patrols are on the way, but their ETA is ten plus minutes, because of the chaos."_

Pearce himself had redundant connections. That way, if a part of the ctOS network went out, his phone would automatically switch to another carrier tower. It wasn't a service that was available to the general public. And the blackout would still have taken out everything that required a power connection and didn't have a generator of its own. No traffic cams, for one, he wouldn't be able to see as far or as much as he was used to.

"They know nothing?"

 _"Doesn't look like it,"_ she said, paused. _"You think that shooting has got something to do with us?"_

"Looks like a duck, doesn't it?"

Mia chuckled, but sobered up immediately. _"Just be careful, okay?"_

"I always am."

_"Yeah right."_

The area of the blackout was large and while it had hit fairly late at night, it was also the middle of the Loop. Well before Pearce hit the edge of it, the shockwave had already clogged the streets. Pearce pushed in as far as he could go with the car, then simply stopped and got out. The blackouted area was right ahead of him, but it wasn't pitch-black. The darkness was cut up with car headlights and the flickering streaks of phones used as flashlight, there was the odd lighter held up. Some people seemed to have abandoned their vehicles and were heading away from it. In the distance, Pearce spotted the rotating lights from police and from a few streets off, he heard the siren of a firetruck.

He pulled his phone out as he kept walking, found a ctOS camera still working and used it to take a look across the area ahead. He picked up several phone signals, jumped from one to the other as the scenery changed. In the shifty light, the deeper he got into the blackouted zone, the more it resembled ground zero of some kind of attack, or at least a large-scale accident. Several cars piled up over each other, jammed together by bent metal and burning rubber.

Pearce looked up, but the cloud of black smoke was invisible between the high-rise buildings on either side. On his phone, he scrolled through the carnage until he was close to the front of Heather's safe-house. A police cruiser had been turned on it's side, but it's dash-cam was still working. Scattered around an open space were more burning cars. The bodies of two uniformed cops lay close by, both either dead or unconscious. There was no other movement, just the flames.

Pearce cut the connection to the dash-cam, hit the dial button and pocketed the phone, broke into a run even while the dial tone rang quietly in his earpiece.

"Where are you?" Pearce asked as he wove through the pedestrians leaving the blackouted area, ignoring the looks they send after him.

 _"Near LaSalle station,"_ Jordi answered. _"A steam pipe blew right in my path. I hate to say it, but whatever's going down, probably already did."_

Pearce scowled and kept his agreement to himself. He pulled his mask over his face as he went, breathing a little easier when the abrasive sting of the smoke filtered through it.

"There was a shootout and an explosion," Pearce said. "I didn't see Quinn, if you get to her first, keep her alive."

_"There's that word again."_

"Has to get through to you eventually."

The people in Pearce path were increasingly confused, some panicked, trying to get away. The stench of burning was in the air and an ominous glow hung over the abandoned cars. Pearce slowed down a little, leapt on top of a car and stopped, surveyed the scene. There were more bodies than he'd spotted through the cameras, at least six strewn around in front of the apartment building. He guessed there'd been a shootout with Heather's PSD. The attackers had taken cover behind their cars, explaining the uneven half circle they formed around the door. A police cruiser had crashed into them, perhaps intentionally, knocking some of them out. Cops had joined the fray, but at some point, a stray bullet or just because of the crash, at least one of the cars had blown up.

He jumped from the car and advanced slowly, walked from one body to the next. He'd seen enough death, he didn't expect many of these people to still be alive and there were no surprises. Their causes of death varied, though. Two of the men at the door had been shot, one had taken a headshot, but his companion had taken a bullet to the stomach and bled out.

He left the door and checked with the cops, but it was much the same. One buried underneath a car, another with a bullet in the shoulder and the throat. Pearce took a deep breath as he straightened away from the body to look around, then stepped along the half-circle of cars. The attackers hadn't fared any better. The Club soldier all wore bulletproof vests, but they had provided little protection against the sharp-edged pieces of metal the exploding car had hailed them with.

Something moved, just at the edge of his vision.

Snapping around, he swung the baton free and ducked low against the side of a smouldering car. It took him a moment to find the source of movement again, too faint to come from an enemy. Half buried behind debris and hidden in the shadows, a man had struggled into a sitting position, though he made no other attempt to move. Pearce watched him for a moment, until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the details. The man had been caught in the explosion, his clothes were tattered and singed, just like what was visible of his skin.

Pearce approached him carefully, then crouched down slowly by the man's side, taking in his state, recognising him as one of Ramsey's team.

A length of metal was buried deep in the man's chest, just above the collarbone, blood was pushing out with every laboured breath. He focussed sluggishly on Pearce, turned his head and even then didn't seem to see him.

Pearce pulled the mask down, plastered a softer expression on his face.

"Help is coming," he said quietly. "Don't pull out the metal, it's keeping you alive right now. You get that?"

The man blinked slowly. He started lifting a hand, flexing his fingers as if he planned to trace along the metal in his chest, but either lacked the strength or conviction to do it, or he understood what Pearce was actually telling him.

"You were protecting Heather Quinn," Pearce continued. "Do you know what happened to her?"

The flare in the man's eyes betrayed him, he _knew,_ but he made no attempt to speak. His chest rose and fell, his breath rattled in the quiet.

"I'm not here to hurt her, I'm going to save her," Pearce said, leaned in a little closer. "But you'll have to help me."

The man just stared at him, determination made him press his lips into a thin line. His gaze skittered away from Pearce and his head drooped back a little.

Pearce shook his head, impatience nagging at him. He heard the police siren in the distance, his time was running out.

"I'm no friend of the Chicago South Club," he said. "Who do you think gave Heather Quinn in the first place? Tell me, come on."

"You…" the man croaked.

"Yes, me," Pearce said, a little sharper. "Where is she?"

The man tried to take a breath, blinked slowly a few times, but either broke or resolved to trust Pearce. Either was fine with him.

"I don't know… she… Ben and she ran down that ally when shit started to blow up. I… there were guys after them. I didn't… I couldn't… help."

Pearce looked over his shoulder at the gaping maw of the ally the man had indicated.

"Thank you," he said then, looked back down at the man. "You hear the siren? You just focus on that, okay? Stay awake. Help will be here any minute."

He didn't linger with the man, not to make sure he was listening or whether there was resolve in him or not. It'd be long minutes until help really came and longer until he was found in all the wreckage if he couldn't draw attention because he was too weak or passed out.

Pearce stalked to the ally, quickly but carefully. It didn't feel like an ambush was waiting for him, but while he trusted his instincts, he knew they were a blunt weapon at best. There were more bodies strewn around the ally, cops in uniform, Ramsey's team-member in normal clothes, Club soldiers in more advanced combat gear, but even here, everything was silent, no hidden gunman to take a shot and there was no place left for him to hide, either. The fight had turned trash containers upside down, dispersing their contents across the street.

"Pearce," someone called, very quietly.

Half-buried under a Club soldier, Pearce spotted Heather Quinn amidst debris and trash in a pool of blood. The Club soldier had a shard buried in his neck from the side, it must have ruptured an artery and he'd bled out within moments, burying Heather under his weight.

Pearce dragged him off with some ineffectual help from Heather. She raised her head at him, glared, but then let her head drop back. She sighed. She was drenched in blood and made no attempt to get up.

"Are you hurt?"

"Yes," she said, but her voice was barely audible.

Pearce dropped to a knee by her side. "Can you walk?"

"No," she breathed. She made an aborted move, trying to get up anyway, but her body shook too much for her to get anywhere.

Pearce reached out a hand and she stilled. He stood up, cast a quick glance up and down the ally.

"Jordi? You still there?"

_"Should be near, something exploded here, have you noticed?"_

"Take the first ally on the left."

It took another few minutes until Jordi appeared in the ally. He arched his brows at the carnage, rested a momentarily thoughtful look on Heather, then focussed on Pearce.

"I didn't do it," Pearce said.

Jordi gave a quick, sharp grin. "I wasn't making any assumptions."

"We'll be heading for Quincy," Pearce said, he pushed the baton closed in his hands, then bent down to gather Heather in his arms. She winced, folded an arm around his back and fisted her hand into the leather of his coat.

"I don't know if anyone's still looking for her," Pearce said to Jordi. "I need you to shadow us, I can't do much when I'm carrying her."

Jordi shrugged. "You got it."

* * *

Heather swam back into consciousness on an operating table, floating inside a bubble of painlessness. Outside that bubble, there was a needle going through the skin on her stomach, there was the heat of burns on her shoulder and the cresting exhaustion of waning adrenaline. 

"You should never remove things," an unknown voice chided, close by, so she assumed it was whoever was patching her up. She was too tired to check.

"I didn't," Pearce answered, gravelly voice bare of any inflection. "She did. She used the shard to defend herself."

Pearce was further away, on the other side of the room perhaps and Heather could easily picture him, watching her and the surgeon like a hawk.

She remembered the past few hours only in flashes, too much happening too quickly and none of it pleasant.

The pulling and tucking on her body stopped and she lay for a while undisturbed. It occurred to her that she would have to move soon, open her eyes and face the music.

"I stopped the internal bleeding," the surgeon said, moving away from her. "The hand was pretty bad, too, but it'll heal. She needs rest."

She heard herself chortle, shocked herself back into reality with it and opened her eyes, staring at a grey ceiling and grey walls, clearly belonging to a surgery housed in a basement room, but at least it seemed to be kept fastidiously clean.

"Are we done?" Pearce asked.

She turned her head to watch her surgeon sit on a stool by her side, looking across the room at Pearce poised casually in the doorway.

The surgeon hesitated, glanced at her briefly, then back to Pearce. He said, "That's Heather Quinn."

A smile tucked at the corners of her mouth at his incredulity, but Pearce was more interesting. He just waited, pointedly unaffected by the implication-heavy silence filling the room, letting the surgeon's imagination run wild with whatever threat he needed.

Finally the surgeon flustered and said, "Not that it's any of my business."

Heather felt her jaw snap as she opened her mouth, clenched too tight for too long. She said, "It's not."

She brought her hands under her and pushed herself up. The surgeon immediately jumped up to help her and the pain punctured her bubble sharply. She bared her teeth, caught Pearce's gaze, he hadn't moved at all.

"Mrs. Quinn," the surgeon said. "Keep an eye on the bandages. If you start bleeding, or if the wounds start weeping, you've got to come back. Watch for infection, too. I cleaned everything up, but there's no telling. I'll pack you some painkillers and more bandages."

It took her a moment to recognise the real worry in his tone. "Thanks," she said.

"Don't," Pearce remarked. "He's charging me for it."

The surgeon shrugged, unabashed. "I got to earn my living."

He let go of Heather and stepped back, walked to the back of the room and washed his hands.

For the first time, Pearce seemed to really acknowledge her presence in the room at all, cool eyes assessed her critically, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

The surgeon glanced over his shoulder and cleared his throat. "My payment…" he begun.

Pearce only made a small movement with his hand, drawing attention to the phone there. "Already done."

The surgeon's phone beeped in his pocket, startled him a little and he fished it out with still damp hands. Heather couldn't see the phone, but she recognised the surprise on his face well enough.

"We're leaving," Pearce announced and drew back into the hallway.

Heather slipped from the bed and stood for a moment awkwardly, barefoot on the cold floor. The surgeon rifled through the cabinets along the wall, pulled out bandages and a packet of painkillers, shoving both into Heather's hands.

* * *

Heather sunk into the passenger seat of Pearce's car, still clutching the bandages and wondering if it was too soon to start with the painkillers. Her belly felt as if it had been ripped open, her innards all messed up and then sewn closed again. Though, she supposed that wasn't far from the truth. 

Pearce was focussed on his phone when she got in the car and didn't put it away immediately. His glance passed over her and he said, "I got a call to make."

He started the car, tabbed his phone. They were parked on some gravel backyard and the car shook before they hit the street, beating through the shrinking bubble protecting her from discomfort. She settled her head into the headrest, listened to Pearce's conversation.

"Heather Quinn," he said with emphasis. "You can say it, no one's listening in."

She wondered if that was true for anyone in Chicago, if he was just cocky and setting himself up for a fall.

"Trust me," he added. "Heather's fine. I'm taking her to a safe-house for now. - - - No, not until we found Ramsey's mole."

He listened for a moment, then said, "They can't dismantle all their operations. Too expensive, too many people, too muck data redundancy. There's time."

She turned her head to watch his profile against the early morning gloom outside the window, trying to read in his face. She doubted he would say anything on the phone she could use against him later.

"I'll call you back once we're settled in. There's a folder called 'springbreak', I need you to set it up. - - - Yeah, I did." He chuckled, said, "Wouldn't you like to know. - - - I'll get back to you."

She didn't see him hang up, but she was barely looking at him anymore. The city was taking shape beyond the windshield. She recognised the area, Mad Mile, not too far from the Merlaut Hotel where Lucky had died those years ago.

She said, "I need new clothes."

She felt his attention snap to her, the gaze passing over her, but she didn't deign to look back. Her clothes were torn in several places, the surgeon had cut her blouse up to her armpit to get to her wound on the side of her stomach.

"Good idea," he agreed. He sounded amused. She saw the slight shift as he thumbed on his phone again, it took a few glances down and back up on the street, he wasn't slowing down, then he called someone again.

"You got out alright?" Pearce asked on the phone, barely a phrase, but Heather was fairly certain he wouldn't extend even that courtesy if he didn't like the person on the other end. She guessed he was talking to the fixer from earlier. She only recalled him vaguely, she'd been too out of it.

"Don't," Pearce said. "I need you to buy some clothes. - - - Doesn't matter, something practical. - - - Size 6, shoes is an 8." Whatever answer he got, it seemed to amuse him, but it barely made it to his voice. "They don't have to. - - - Yeah. I'll text you an address, don't waste time."

She didn't want to ask him how he knew these things about her. She supposed it was easy information to find, after all. Her tailor had her measurements on her computer and perhaps she'd typed it in a search engine, once, without thinking about it, but the internet had a long memory and he the patience to dig it up. He could just as easily have asked her, but he'd chosen not to.

"What now?" she asked.

"There's a mole on Ramsey's team," he answered. "Until I know who it is, I can't give you back. Something like tonight could happen again, it doesn't have to go down so harmlessly."

"I told you."

She couldn't find the energy to put much vitriol into it, but that was the good thing about dealing with subtle people, she didn't need to and the idea would still get across.

"But it's not over," she added and it wasn't a question. He wasn't going to let go of her so easily, if anything, he was going to hold on to her harder.

"No, I'll figure something out with Ramsey," he said. He braked sharply on a stop sign, used the reprieve to look at her directly. She turned her head to meet his gaze.

"You just keep holding up your end."

"Under your supervision?" she asked, choked on a laugh.

The corner of his mouth twitched, but if he was amused again or if it was disgust, she wasn't sure.

"Keeps you honest," he said.

She let his gaze dig into hers for a long moment before she decided to blink and dismiss the contest, leave it hanging and open-ended. She didn't feel him withdraw his attention, but he accelerated the car again, as unbothered as she was. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **While we're at it... Recommended watching:** If you're looking for something satisfying to watch, give 'Ray Donovan' and 'Banshee' a chance, they are my two most recent favourites.
> 
>  **(So** … Jordi? Are you sure that blown steam-pipe had nothing to do with you and maybe a little accidental slip of the thumb?)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason, everybody's clothing needed to be described all the time and I despise describing clothing. There's no subtle way to do it. Last time this sort of thing happened, I made Aiden go shirtless in Firewalker just so I didn't have to. Is it okay if I set the rest of this story in a everybody's-a-nudist AU?

 

Heather was woken unkindly, some milling cutter tearing into concrete nearby. She dimly recalled construction sites in the street, still abandoned and quiet when they'd driven past them hours before. The area consisted of old warehouses and seemed to be in the process of being converted to high-prized loft for those who could afford it.

Her body hurt dully while was lying on the bed, but the moment she sat up the pain flared up sharply, almost wringing a cry from her. She clamped her mouth shut tightly instead and sat still until the pain abated enough for her to get up. It turned out, Pearce was among those who could afford it. He didn't live in this place, though. It felt and looked empty and when she opened the wardrobe in the bedroom, the few clothes there were carelesslyto folded, some still in their plastic wrapping and with the tags still attached. 

She found bags on a table by the bed with new clothes for herself, a glance revealed something slippery and black and dark jeans. She ignored it for now, pushed the wide sliding door aside to find herself in a large room, open kitchen on the right, a set of leather couches on the left. The far wall was occupied by a long, heavy table, black screens mirroring the room back at her. It didn't seem as impressive a computer setup as she had imagined, just two screens and a stack of towers, their ventilation whirring quietly to itself.

There was no sign of Pearce.

A paper-bag stood on the kitchen counter, full of food, but the thought of eating made her feel queazy and reminded her of the state of her intestines. Prompted, she pulled her old blouse up, but she saw only the bandage around her waist, she slipped her hand over it slowly without putting too much pressure on it. Her right hand was also bandaged, it hurt to flex her fingers, but it was just this side of bearable. She recalled the moment she'd wrapped her fingers around some hard-edged shard buried in her belly. Pulling it from her flesh had hurt far worse than the short instant it had taken to puncture her. The man who'd come after her was out of bullets, he'd launched himself at her. It had seemed like none of them had wanted to take her alive. He'd have choked her with his bare hands for however long it took. So the unyielding thing stuck inside her body had been the only other option.

_"Hey there."_

Heather snapped around, winced at the pain and narrowed her eyes. One of the computer screens had come alive, showing the face of a young woman.

Heather walked to the desk slowly, trailing her gaze along the walls around the room, looking for the cameras.

"Where's Pearce?" Heather asked.

_"Fixing things with Ramsey,"_ the girl said. _"He'll be back in a few hours. He said to tell you that trying to leave wouldn't be a good idea. You're also pretty safe there, so that's a plus, right?"_

"You work for him?"

_"Obviously,"_ the girl said cheerfully. _"I'm Ella. So… uh, you shouldn't get your bandages wet, so don't take a bath, but it's okay to get cleaned up. There's food if you feel up to it. I'm afraid Pearce bought it, so I hope you aren't into clean eating. If you feel like you're bleeding out or something like that, just shout, okay? I'm right here."_

Heather ignored the dig at her appearance, she knew she looked at her worst, but studied the girl instead, wondering where she fit in all of this. She looked nice, barely in her twenties and in a good mood despite the bags under her eyes. She wasn't what Heather, or anyone, had imagined an accomplice of Pearce to look like, but perhaps that was the point. Hacker-types came in all shapes and sizes, more so than other vocations, so perhaps this made sense, too.

"You're watching me," Heather said.

_"It's not as creepy as it sounds,"_ the girl said.

Heather snorted and didn't comment.

_"It's for your own safety,"_ the girl added and tried hard not show how uncomfortable she was with the topic. That was the problem with young associates, Heather thought, easy on the eye, but not so hard-boiled. Pearce would be hard to crack, but the girl, now, she had potential.

Heather only said, "It's fine."

She turned away from the screen and the girl seemed just as happy to drop it.

* * *

There were always several things on the mind of EADA Phineas Ramsey. His mind just worked like that, it never quite seemed to slow down, never at rest, always focussed on his most important goals. It had been hell on his relationship, since high school, through college and right to his last breakup seven years before. _Like trying to be in love with a motherfucking computer,_ he been told, in these words or similar ones, each time someone walked out of his door. He supposed it should bother him, but it never seemed worth the effort. People made their choices and as long as these choices kept them within the confines of the law, it was no concern of his. 

What _did_ bother him was Heather Quinn and the well-orchestrated attack that had taken her away from him. What bothered him were the dead police officers scattered around a Chicago city street. It bothered him that ctOS had once again proved just how ineffective it could be if the wrong hand was at its controls. The Blume liaison had been subserviently apologetic about the incident and he supposed the almost complete absence of details on the news were Blume's way of making up for it.

If he was honest with himself, he derived a certain satisfaction from this failure. He didn't much like this age of smart devises he found himself in. He didn't trust computer algorithms to reveal much about human nature, they were more complex and more contradictory than just a strong of ones and zeroes. Perhaps the future was going to be different, but for him, in his life, he trusted himself far more than any machine.

Blume had been ridiculously unable to find even a trace of Heather Quinn or provide more than a very vague reconstruction of events. It was no satisfying result when weighed against the lives lost and the money spent. And it paled even more spectacularly when compared to the cost it would demand from all of them if Heather Quinn returned to the Club and helped repaired the damage her talking with Ramsey had already infliced.

Ramsey registered the sound of the door opening, audible over the rush of water as he washed his hands. He noticed and dismissed it, but when he straightened and turned around, the pieces fell into place so perfectly it cut like glass.

Aiden Pearce had pulled the door closed behind him, blocked the way flawlessly despite being somewhat smaller than his images — and image — tended to make him appear. He looked unassuming, dressed in the same generic badly tailored suit that barely registered anymore. A visitor's badge hung around his neck, the computer-readable code dully reflective in the restroom's unflattering lighting.

Ramsey recognised the phenomenon. In the beginning, Pearce's coat and hat and mask had been a way of camouflage, but once his appearance had entered public awareness, its function had been turned on its head. Now, he was invisible the precise moment he took these things off.

"I knew it was you," Ramsey said, unconcerned with the brief moment of shock of finding Pearce there. It made too much sense to indulge in his own surprise.

Pearce looked calm, despite what Ramsey knew was a risky gamble. No matter how well-prepared and thought-out a plan it was, Pearce could never be certain he'd walk away again.

"Quinn is safe," Pearce said. "You have a mole on your team. I couldn't find them, but you know them better. Until that's taken care of, Quinn stays with me."

Ramsey suspected he knew where Pearce was going with this, but it seemed juvenile to him, unsuitable to the both of them. Ramsey shook his head, leaned his hip against the sink and gestured slightly with his hand to emphasise his point in case Pearce wasn't quite as smart as he pretended to be.

"That's not going to work," Ramsey pointed out.

"You haven't listened to my offer."

"And I don't have to," Ramsey said. "You want me to continue Heather Quinn's questioning through some webcam setup you have in some hideaway somewhere. She's in a place I don't know and can't control. I have to be in the same room, you must understand that. How would I even know when she's lying? Only when you tell me? Because you hang around somewhere behind the camera? There is not a defence attorney worth his salt who wouldn't tear everything she says to shreds and I can't think of many judges who wouldn't help them. Whatever she gives me under those conditions, I won't be able to use it. Your very involvement makes it practically inadmissible by default."

Pearce said nothing for a moment, his eyes narrowed in irritation, but his expression remained unchanged otherwise while he considered the truth of what Ramsey had said.

"What if I return her later?" Pearce asked.

This, more than anything, actually did surprise Ramsey. He'd expected Pearce to be more stubborn. Men like him, they had no patience for the way the law worked, no tolerance for its slow, often convoluted and sometimes poor results. After all, that was the driving force behind a vigilante's conviction.

"That depends," Ramsey conceded. "How long do you want to keep her?"

"Until you plug the leak."

The thought raised Ramsey's heckles, if only a little. He trusted his team, he knew them inside out and the very assumption one of them had turned on him was an insult. Which, however, didn't mean it was untrue. It paid to keep a realistic outlook on these things.

Ramsey pushed a hand through his hair, a show of indecision he allowed himself because it was unlikely to cause any damage.

"Any suggestion of where to start?" he asked, half in jest, but he suspected Pearce had his fingers deep in his team's personnel files already.

The ghost of a smile flitted across Pearce's composed expression. He said, "Two hours before the attack, your man, Thomas Carr, made a call to an unregistered prepaid phone."

"That's not a lot."

"The recipient was somewhere in the Mad Mile district. Calls like that are hard to track. I could do it or," he said. "You get Blume to do it for you."

Ramsey thought about it. "Carr died," he pointed out. "They _all_ died. If I were selling out on that scale, I'd make sure I'm alive to profit from it."

Pearce shook his head. "Things like that, they don't always go down according to plan. It could've been an accident, or the Club was just tying up loose ends. Death doesn't prove innocence."

It was hard to argue with it, even if Ramsey didn't like the scenario that was slowly taking shape. He'd worked with Carr for years, his death had rattled him worse than he was willing to admit outside the privacy of his own thoughts.

Ramsey found himself nodding slowly to himself, acknowledging at least the _potential_ truth Pearce's suspicions held.

For the first time, Pearce moved, if only to make a small step forward, toeing the line before he crossed into Ramsey's personal space in the narrow room.

"Can you make it work?" Pearce asked.

Ramsey took the question seriously, spent the time he needed to think it through and follow all the possible implications of this peculiar constellation. He took a heavy sigh, unhappy with the outcome every single time.

"Ideally, you bring her back immediately."

"Not happening."

"I see. Well, in that case, I can work with what she's given me so far and we clean house in the meantime. But…" he paused, thought it through one more time. "If it takes too long, it'll fall apart and we'd have to start from scratch. The Club isn't just sitting there. Every day that passes, they have a day to do their own cleaning. There'll come a point where Heather Quinn won't have anything worthwhile to say."

"Better hurry then," Pearce said. Ramsey suspected he understood the problems Ramsey was facing, but Pearce didn't much care how easy or difficult they were to handle. Pearce wanted results, it was entirely in line with his character.

Something else occurred to him, though, and it made him chuckle dryly. "I have to ask, even if it's cliché, why do you think I'd let you leave?"

His question was met with the same parched amusement. "Your priorities," Pearce answered.

"Is that so? Because it looks like you might be the bird in my hand. I could cut my losses," he wagged his head a little, pretending to consider. "Arguably, you're the bigger prize."

Pearce shook his head slightly, neither intimidated nor upset. Very calmly, he said, "Yeah, you'd just lose everything."

"You're very certain of yourself," Ramsey remarked. "You see yourself as the lesser evil compared to the Club, but I know many people who'd disagree."

Pearce didn't answer, only shrugged. Ramsey wondered briefly what Pearce thought of him, coming here like this, risking so much just for a chat.

"I'll know when it's done," Pearce said, already dismissing Ramsey's potential threat. He turned to go, his hand already at the door.

"Wait," Ramsey called and Pearce stopped, glanced back over his shoulder. "Well, maybe you have your ways, but what if I need to contact you?"

Pearce didn't react immediately. He must have expected many things, perhaps even that Ramsey turned on him and risked a messy hunt for Pearce. He hadn't expected a working relationship, no matter how fleeting.

Pearce nodded. "I'll drop you a message with contact information."

He didn't say that any contact might be used to track him, at any given moment. Ramsey didn't have the means, he didn't understand the technology, but CPD and Blume had better resources.

Pearce waited another moment, but when Ramsey said nothing, he left. Ramsey spotted the 'out of order' sign on the outside of the restroom door, caught a brief glimpse of his colleges passing by outside in the corridor.

Pearce was right, of course. Ramsey couldn't anticipate what would happen if Pearce was taken out of the equation. Fear of Pearce kept the Club occupied in many small ways, leaving them open and vulnerable for any attack coming from a different direction. With him gone, or even just the target of a city-wide manhunt, the Club and the gangs would breath a lot freer.

By the time Ramsey returned to his desk, he found a new email waiting for him, with the subject line 'contact'. Once this was over, he'd let the IT department have a shot at this. Pearce was too dangerously unstable to be allowed to remain free.

* * *

By the time Pearce returned, Heather had cleaned herself up and dressed. She'd forced down half a toast and, with somewhat more enthusiasm, a generous amount of painkillers. 

Some further investigation of the place had revealed that the front door was locked and so was the weapons' cabinet in the living room. The computers didn't respond, although she could hear them humming quietly, proving they were running. She'd mapped the cameras, living room, bedroom and bath, but she doubted she'd spotted them all. The loft's windows were too high up for her to reach, even if she climbed on top of a table. It wasn't a bad choice for a hideout. Snipers would have a hard time finding a target with these windows and their frosted glass distorted everything they might make out.

Once the pain had let up, she'd curled up on the bed and fallen asleep. When she woke up again, it was late in the afternoon and the light was soft and golden. She rolled on her back and let the light fall on her face for a moment, enjoying the tranquility. The move had caused the skin to pull on her stitches, but she felt like she was hardening to it slowly. It still hurt, but it had become somehow irrelevant.

Steeling herself, she slowly sat up, then slipped to her feet and walked into the living room.

Pearce had his back to her, focussed on the computer in front of him, data scrolling past all the screens, status messages and split-screen surveillance video from somewhere in Chicago. In a corner was a live-feed from the girl, whose name certainly wasn't 'Ella'. She was talking, but there was no sound, so Heather assumed Pearce wore some kind of earpiece.

It took a moment for him to notice her. He hit a key and some of the data on the screen in front of him stopped. He looked over his shoulder and studied her silently. She looked pale, she knew, and bleary-eyed despite having slept for hours, but his assessment had less to do with her looks and more with her health.

"You talked with Ramsey," she said.

"Yes," he confirmed. "I thought you two can keep talking, I got the setup here, but Ramsey…" he left it open, didn't seem too happy about the call Ramsey had made.

She had to laugh a little. "He didn't want to do it, did he?"

"No."

He typed something on the computer, muttered something inaudible before the window with the girl closed. In getting up, he picked up a tablet and strode to the couch.

"I have a few questions," he said as he sat down.

For a moment, she resisted the gravitational pull of him, the casual way he thought he could command her. She forced herself to relax, or at least its imitation, then she walked to the couch and sat down.

"When I called you, you said the man with you at the time was working for the Club," Pearce began without any preamble. "At the time, your PSD consisted of Elliot Cho and Frank Taylor. Who were you talking about?"

"I didn't know their names," she said. "I mean, not as corrupt cops." She held out her hands helplessly. "I see and talk to a lot of people."

When Pearce just waited, she answered, "Taylor."

"Hmm," Pearce made, focussed on the tablet. "After the call, I checked both Cho and Taylor, there is nothing."

He looked up, expression as if he expected her to look caught, but she felt nothing of the sort.

Smiling slightly, she said, "I thought you'd be smarter than that."

"How so?"

"The times have been changing fast in the last few years. Criminals had to adapt. Me, the Club, the gangs, even the Militia when they're sober. Everyone knows ctOS is always watching. Everyone _knows_ the tech isn't safe. And that's why everyone had to find ways around it."

"You're saying Taylor managed to do all of this offline?"

She took a breathe, buying herself a little time. "We're not talking about existing outside the grid. We're talking about slipping in a covet meeting here or there. On the subway, at the deli, having a smoke. Not even ctOS can keep track of all of it. Or, I mean, it _does_ keep track of all of it. But how would it tell the difference between two strangers waiting for the L? Or strangers flirting at the bar? That kind of thing? ctOS doesn't know what it's looking at."

She thought about it and added, "Yet."

He didn't seem impressed by her speech. He glanced at the tablet, skimming through some information hidden from her sight, but she had a feeling it was force of habit.

"In other words, if I tracked Taylor manually, eventually I'd come across this meet?" he asked.

"I suppose," she shrugged. "Or you won't, because we have hackers working for us and people at Blume who feed us information. ctOS has blind spots, it malfunctions, it can be _made to_ malfunction. You don't need to be told that, do you?"

He ignored the rhetorical question, scrolled through the data and then turned the tablet, holding it out to her.

"Thomas Carr, what about him?"

She studied the picture on the tablet. She remembered him from her stay in the CPD safe-house. He'd liked to talk, his private life was messy. His wife was divorcing him, he was starting to feel old while his life was stuck on a treadmill.

"No," she said. "If he worked for the Club, I've never seen it."

Again Pearce only made a noncommittal sound in his throat.

"What is it about him?"

He looked up at her, studied her again, weighing what he needed to reveal to her if he wanted results.

"Just a hunch," he finally answered, gaze already back on the tablet. He tabbed on it a few times, then got back to his feet and walked back to the computer.

Absent-mindedly cupping her bandaged side, she settled as comfortably as she could into the inflexible leather of the couch and let her gaze drift around the room. The cameras were all still there, but she wondered if he had turned them off, if he didn't like to be observed himself. It was a security risk, any hacker who breached his network could see right into his living room, or at least this temporary abode of his. On the hand, he strived so much in this world of constant surveillance, perhaps it made him uneasy _not_ to be filmed. People had strange habits like that sometimes, especially if, like Pearce, led a very singular existence.

It must have been years since any Club member had been this close to him. He'd been a nobody then, Heather supposed he'd taken their money on more than one occasion, just like any other insignificant fixer in the city. Since then, she'd often wondered who else was there among the fixers, whose talents could be harnessed. If they'd found Pearce and recruited him, early enough in his life, perhaps Lucky's grand plan of putting chains on Blume could have lasted much longer.

Of course, with Lucky and Niall still in the picture, she wasn't sure how important her own role would've become. Lucky had liked her, but she hadn't seen him often enough to know what to make of it. She'd enjoyed the jet-setting life with Kenneth, glamorous, but ultimately fated to grow boring.

"What will happen to me?" she asked. She'd spoken quietly, but Pearce straightened immediately and turned around. He settled his back against the table.

"You'll stay here," he said.

"With you."

"We'll see."

He was about to turn away again, but she said, "Why are you doing this?"

His expression rarely gave anything away. His range of emotions seemed stuck on a narrow range between faint amusement and annoyance, but now his face hardened.

"I'm not the one who has to explain himself," he said. "You run the Chicago South Club. You engage in the same shit as Niall and Lucky. You buy and sell human beings and the only excuse you manage to come up with is _someone's got to do it._ If I can stop you, I will."

Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet and took a few steps in his direction. "I never made any excuses," she said.

"Really? You said if the Club goes down, it'll just be the Russians."

Step by deliberate step, she crossed the space to him. "I was pointing out the futility of what you do," she said. "It wasn't meant to be an excuse."

He gave a dry laugh. "I don't know if that's better or worse."

Her approach jostled him from his still somewhat relaxed position, standing upright, he was taller than her, but he had nowhere to retreat with the table at his back. She didn't know if it bothered him at all when she stepped well into his personal space.

"At least I'm not a hypocrite," she said.

"And I am?" he challenged, anger flashed through his eyes.

"That's something Ramsey said to me," she replied. "You break the law, you break the law." She shrugged, an unconscious imitation of Ramsey's deadpan body language. "You're just another criminal, pretending to be better. And what has it cost you so far? More than you'd ever admit, I bet. Is it worth it?"

Pointedly, she looked away from him for a second, at the computer rig behind his back and everything it stood for. When she looked back at him, she caught that he'd followed her gaze and his attention lingered there. His expression turned briefly pensive and it left a fissure in his armour.

Standing so close already, it was easy to just reach out and put her uninjured hand against the side of his face. He turned his head under her touch, facing her again, but before she even leaned in to kiss him, she realised she'd read him wrong. He didn't tense, his pupils didn't blow wide and his breathing remained perfectly even. He didn't push her hand away, though, or simply walk out of her reach. 

Inwardly, her first impulse was to draw back and let him go. Outwardly, all she did was curve her lips into a sad smile and said, "I'm sorry."

She didn't take her hand back.

"Why?" he asked, low-voiced, she felt the vibration under her fingertips when he spoke.

"Because I can't kiss you," she said. "Without you thinking I'm trying to manipulate you."

"Better that way," he said lightly. "You'd reopen your stitches."

She laughed a little. "With just a kiss?"

He raised his eyebrows, "Oh come on, don't tell me you weren't going to put out."

He'd known she'd do this and now he was mocking her for it. The fury seethed at the back of her mind, but giving up was the first part of losing and she forced it back down before it could give her away. She slipped her hand away with a slow caress, watching his eyes for any sign she was affecting him at all.

"You have to do two things for me," she said, holding her ground right in front of him after dropping her hand.

"Have to?" he echoed disdainfully.

"First, I want to see Iain. And then you kill my husband."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I deliberately set Heather up for that last little bit. Last time I seduced Aiden I needed three chapters of setup and in that instance he actually liked the girl. In this case, he's trying very hard not to snap her neck, which is about the limit of his sympathy.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really fucking long chapter. On the upside, you were spared a cliffhanger. I wrote most of this in one go. I think I've never written so many words in such a short time. Hot damn.

"Why?"

Pearce sat on the couch across from her, slightly off-centre with his left arm resting on the back. His phone lay on the couch by his right hand, the screen lit brightly, but he'd only occasionally glance in its direction. He'd sometimes reach for it and trace its outline with his fingers, the only sign of impatience in his otherwise relaxed posture.

Heather considered the question for a long minute. She'd been burned by reading him wrong, she saw no reason to repeat the mistake.

"Because you're wrong about him," she said. She took a breath, shook her head a little. "I don't know what you saw when you spied on us. But I guess these things have limitations. Kenneth is Lucky Quinn's son. When Niall died, he was the heir apparent, anyone who wanted the top job had to beat him. But Kenneth, he doesn't have the patience for that sort of thing, he's too brash to manipulate or compromise. He's not a good leader, he doesn't understand the intricacies."

"But you do," Pearce said, so neutrally she could've believed there was no hidden insult, but she knew better.

She refused his cue. "What you saw, before you came after me, that's not common knowledge in the Club. Kenneth is the leader. If he gives an order, there's no one left who'd refuse it. I made sure of that, after Niall's death."

"You think he ordered the hit on you," Pearce said.

She had to smile a little. "No one else would dare. I made sure of that, too."

"Now suddenly he's a good leader?"

"No, but he's using a power structure tailored to him. It'll fall apart on him, when he makes too many wrong decisions, alienates his best people, but that's going to be…" she waved her hand vaguely in the air. "A few months?Maybe a year or two, it depends on the pressure he's put under."

When Pearce didn't answer, Heather leaned forward and added, "You and Ramsey, you don't have that much time."

Pearce narrowed his eyes at her, visibly displeased for a second before he schooled his features again.

"What happens if Kenneth is taken out?"

"It's hard to be certain," she said, honestly. She'd have liked to have a more convincing story for him, but she suspected he'd see through it and it would only weaken her case. "But my best guess is, it'll cause a lot of chaos. There's no obvious candidate to succeed him, so there'll be infighting. It wouldn't destroy the Club, but it would weaken it. And it'd mean you have some time."

"It'd mean your information to Ramsey goes obsolete."

"Not that quickly," she said, smiled cooly. "It'll work. In fact, it'll work to your advantage. It'll make it harder to destroy evidence before Ramsey can secure it. Who knows? Some people might even be willing to sell each other out."

She fixed him sharply and added, "It's a good plan. And it's one of the only ways you can ensure my safety. When Kenneth dies, the bets are off. I have no idea who the mole reports to, maybe they'll go under in the fallout, or go quiet to avoid attention, or they'll trip up. Either way, they won't be as dangerous anymore."

Pearce kept watching her. He uncrossed his legs and sunk a little more comfortably into the couch. His right hand kept playing with the phone, pulling it up and letting it slide through his fingers.

"You don't care for your husband?" he finally asked, tone carefully neutral but with an unexpected note of puzzlement lurking in the background.

She narrowed her eyes at him, felt the anger carve into her face. She said, "I'm selling his entire organisation to the cops. He needs to take me out. And that means, _I_ need to take _him_ out. It's that or lie down and wait for death."

The wound in her stomach pulsed sharply as she leaned forward, settled her elbows on her knees and fixed him across the table. "It's something I don't do, but don't blame me for something I didn't want."

The phone slipped through his fingers again, thudded on the leather when he let it glide too far and dropped to the side. He kept saying nothing, gaze still hard on her. She wondered if he was already planning how to approach Kenneth, or whether he didn't trust her reasoning well enough to even try. In truth, she hadn't expected him to be quite so resistant to her suggestion. He didn't like the Club, she'd always assumed it was something personal at play and there were enough rumours to back it up, but it turned out to be surprisingly hard to confirm any of them.

Heather forced herself to relax, just a little, in the hope it would transfer to him in some minor way, make him realise she didn't want to be his enemy, at least not right now.

"About before," she started when he continued to say nothing. "I don't want you to misunderstand me." 

"Sex is politics," he observed, unimpressed.

Heather chuckled, shook her head. "Not at all, the opposite, in fact. I sleep with people for fun, because I find them attractive. You," she said. "You are an interesting man, I was curious. That's all."

"You don't know me."

She heard the threat in the rough cadences of his voice. He wasn't talking about that one incident, she doubted he cared too much about that, he was warning her of what could happen if she got him wrong one too many times, trying to play him.

"That's right," she agreed, too dismissively. "I don't. But I know you have the skill and the guts to finish what you started."

"By killing Kenneth Quinn."

In sudden exasperation, she threw her hands up, then let herself drop back, winced at the pain of the too-fast movement. She glowered at him. "And we're right back where we started from, you…" she clenched her teeth shut for a second, then said, "Did you even listen?"

Unexpectedly, a smile tucked on the corners of his lips. "I'll look into it," he said as if he'd been meaning to do that all along. 

* * *

In the days that followed, Heather only caught snatches and disparate parts of Pearce's planning and preparation. She'd also expected him to be staying with her, in some kind of uncomfortable cohabitation, but while he never stayed away for more than a few hours, he was clearly _living_ elsewhere.

She'd caught him sleeping on the couch only once, when she'd been woken again by construction work and padded into the living room one early morning. He'd been sprawling on the couch, booted feet hung over the armrest on one end. By the time she'd taken a few steps into the room, however, he'd already sat up, pulled some kind of plug from his ear. It had taken him a long moment to actually focus on her, reaffix that ill-tempered mask of his over his face. She wondered what he'd been doing, but she already knew he wasn't going to tell her, so asking would just count against her.

She had hoped he'd involve her more closely. She was the obvious insider in Kenneth Quinn's peculiarities. If there was anyone who could predict him, it would be her. Pearce seemed aware of it, but he only quizzed her about things, seemingly at random and usually without giving her much context to figure out where he was at. In fact, she had the feeling he was testing her trustworthiness rather than using her to confirm something he'd learned elsewhere. She wasn't a potential source of information to him, she was a potential liability he was cutting out. It made it hard for her to judge how far he had progressed, it made her itchy and irritable and tired of making nice with him.

Sitting on a barstool, she flexed her left arm where it was prickling from being held up while Pearce was redressing her wound. She kept stoically silent during the procedure, unwilling to show the occasional flashes of pain it caused. The metal shard had ripped her skin and flesh into an ugly, uneven wound that was slow to heal and the pain was a constant, even with the painkillers.

"Keep breathing," Pearce ordered. It jolted her from her ill-fitting reverie. She hadn't realised she'd been holding her breath, anticipating the sting of the ointment.

"I'm fine," she snapped, squaring her shoulders to get rid of some of the tension that only made the pain worse.

"Just breathe," he reiterated, but said nothing more.

Heather fixed her gaze ahead, stared at the kitchen cabinet there as if it was the most interesting thing she'd ever seen. Perhaps Pearce was grateful she made no attempt to come onto him in these moments when she was already half-naked and he had no option but to lean in close and touch her. If he was, he gave no indication.

"When will I see Iain?" she asked and Pearce paused for a moment in what he was doing.

"Soon," he said, but it didn't sound like a commitment.

Hers was clearly not the first bad wound he'd dressed, he did a much better job than she would've been able to on her own, especially with her left hand out of commission, too. Soon enough, he stepped back from her and bagged the old dressing, then pulled the surgical gloves off, meeting her gaze.

"It's going to scar," he said.

"You should see the other guy," she joked, unsure what had prompted the remark. She lowered her arm carefully, then reached for her shirt.

Pearce chuckled, but it wasn't quite the scathing sound she knew from him. The moment didn't last, though. He turned away and went to the sink to wash his hands.

He left immediately afterward, without a word of explanation or some clue when he would be back, leaving Heather more frustrated than she'd started out as. A few hours later, however, Pearce returned with Iain.

* * *

Despite the occasional drizzle of snow and the bite of the wind from the lake, it wasn't a cold January afternoon. It allowed the conversion on the former warehouses to proceed even in the winter months. Some of them had been completed and a few of the new gentry had already moved in, often eyeing their expensive cars suspiciously before they got in, in case some of the bulky trucks had left a scratch. 

A food truck had set up shop a little up the street from Pearce's safe-house. It was frequented mostly by construction workers, but the weather was still unpleasant enough that they didn't linger much, just wolfed their food down, talked little among themselves and barely cast a second glance at each other or at Pearce.

_"So let me get this straight,"_ Mia was saying in his ear. _"Like, when you dropped Iain off with her and she asked you to turn the cameras off and you said yes…"_

"I was lying," Pearce finished nonchalantly and gave a fleeting smile to the vendor as he handed him a hotdog.

_"I mean, I kind of suspected it and all…"_ Mia said. _"But you sounded so damn sincere when you said it. You know, that's a little…"_

"Immoral?"

_"I was going to say worrying, but immoral works, too."_

"Hmm," Pearce muttered. He took a bite from the hotdog. "What are they doing?"

_"Well, it seems I was all wrong about why she wanted to see him so badly. Man, she's pissed. Because of the attack on CPD's safe-house, you know? She says she could've died. Uh, do you think Iain even knew about it?"_

"Probably not," he said.

_"Well, she's still blaming him for it big time. I think you need to let her out of there a little more often, she's got cabin fever or something. I was sure when she said she wanted to see him, it was because she missed his pretty face and his six-pack, not just somebody to yell at…"_

"Not mutually exclusive," he remarked, chewing.

_"No, obviously not, because now they're kissing and groping. And… oh, ouch, that looked like it hurt…"_

"I warned her about the stitches."

He took another bite off the hotdog.

Mia didn't say anything for a little while. _"Uh, Pearce?"_ Mia asked, much more tentatively than normal. _"It's like, uh, they are getting into it now. Do I actually have to watch them?"_

"Pillow talk's the best part."

_"It feels wrong,"_ she murmured.

It could practically hear Mia's disapproval crawl through the line, but he wasn't buying it. He highly doubted she'd never hacked her neighbours' webcam just for the entertainment value of it and most of the time it wasn't even that. Cameras, webcams and ctOS surveillance, were a quick way to survey any battlefield, even the lowliest of fixers these days would know how to do it, they couldn't afford not to.

"You don't have to watch, just make sure it's recording."

Heather's reasons for wanting to see Iain were doubtlessly complex. Perhaps she really loved him, but she wasn't the kind of woman who'd let sentiment get in the way of something she really wanted. Pearce didn't trust her, but if he monitored her closely enough, he wouldn't have to.

_"Are you really going after Kenneth Quinn?"_

Pearce shrugged, even though Mia couldn't see him. He said, "It makes sense what she said. Could make Ramsey's job easier, too. Everyone who gets away in the chaos, I can take care of them later. Without the Club's support structure, they'll be easy pickings."

He fell silent when a group of construction workers pushed past him.

"Is it a problem for you?" he asked.

Mia's answer was already in her heavy silence, but she did her best not to let it weigh her voice down too much, _"It's… weird,"_ she said. _"I'm not sure. Is it a problem that I don't know if it's a problem?"_

"Will it interfere with your job?"

This time, her answer wasn't delayed and she sounded less strained. _"No, absolutely not… couldn't happen to a nicer guy, right?"_

Pearce considered this, but decided to drop it. "What do we have on Kenneth?" he asked to bring the conversation back on track. Mia seemed to perk up immediately.

_"He's still staying in the house in Parker Square. It's busy as shit, lots of coming and going, but I haven't been able to take a look inside."_

"I told you days ago," Pearce remarked with exaggerated surprise. "What's keeping you out?"

_"IT people who actually know about IT security,"_ Mia grumbled. _"Kenneth Quinn's villa has been renovated with state-of-the art tech. It's some modified version of Blume's SmartHome OS, but I can't figure out a way in. It's got none of the normal vulnerabilities."_

"Makes sense," Pearce remarked. Blume had only recently moved into the home automation market. They had originally adapted ctOS — already meant to network any number of different hardware devises and software services. But more recently they'd rolled out a completely new OS. It was very similar to ctOS, but on a much smaller scale, a good test for whenever they were ready to replace ctOS itself.

_"But not one of them ever clicks on the wrong link!"_ Mia complained. _"Or uses 'password' as password?Or forgets to patch? Not one? Not once?"_

"Well, they're working for the mob. Fuck up in your nine-to-five job and you get reprimanded. Fuck up with the mob, you get a pair of concrete shoes."

_"They really do that?"_

He chuckled. "Would you risk it?"

_"No, okay,"_ Mia huffed. _"So… do you have a way inside?"_

Pearce wiped some spilled mustard from his fingers before he picked up his phone to send Mia the access information.

_"Uh… that's Heather's user account,"_ she said. _"I bet it's deactivated by now."_

"Unless it's been completely deleted, Blume can use it to access the home network."

_"It's a backdoor?"_

"Yes, Blume doesn't advertise this 'feature', I'm not even sure it isn't just some leftover piece of code from when they implemented the option to remote reset locked user accounts, but just reseting isn't going to help you with Heather Quinn's login data. You can handle it from here?"

_"It's a fucking backdoor! Damn, Blume leaves out nothing, do they? But… yeah, I think I can get in that way."_

Pearce said nothing for a moment, senses turned away from his phone and the conversation to pay attention to what was going on around him, tracking the construction workers and the few pedestrians around him.

Satisfied, he said, "We're going in in two days, no more than that. Ideally, you've got the place mapped by tomorrow, but don't forget to sleep."

_"Priorities,"_ Mia sniggered. _"Don't worry. I'll get what you need."_

She grew serious again, _"But… are you doing this with Jordi? Or am I going in with you?"_

"Jordi's unavailable for this job," he answered. Jordi didn't like to be seen choosing sides, it went against his sense of independence. He'd rather have somebody experienced to watch his back , but he could do it without backup, if he had a good enough plan.

"I'm going in alone, I need you on monitors."

* * *

Two days later, Pearce was driving over the bridge to Parker Square. May Stadium came into view, brightly lit against the smog domed night-sky and the glimmer of darker velvet and stars, where the richer parts of Parker Square began. His muscle car was a few decades old, a solid and heavy vehicle, a deep rumbling of the engine just at the edge of hearing and even the steering assist system was rough, letting him feel the car's strength through the worn synthetic of the wheel. 

There were no gimmicks in this car, no centre-stack console and GPS displays, no wireless on-the-fly connection for smart devises, no HUD projected to the screen. It was just him and the street lights and the pitch-black asphalt in front of him. Casually, Pearce let go of the wheel to change gears as he slowed down, coming down from the bridge and into the smattering of late-night traffic. The car veered off slightly to the left the moment he let it go.

He held his phone to his ear with the other hand.

"One day," he said. "You'll have to pick sides."

_"One day,"_ Jordi echoed mildly. _"You'll figure out that things aren't in black or white. There are no_ sides _to pick. It's everyone for themselves, like reasonable people."_

"It's not 'reasonable' to be against me."

Jordi snorted, _"We have different definitions of what's reasonable. I work for the money, I don't work for you, a fine but important difference. And this job…"_ Jordi gave a mannered sigh. _"And let's not get carried away here, you just called to tell me you aren't offering it in the first place. It's nice to feel so… deeply… understood, but I'm also just slightly insulted. You know what happens to predictable people? They get a bullet between the eyes. I should know."_ He paused for just a moment. _"What are you up to tonight?"_

Pearce felt the scratch of his own voice in his throat, he said, "Who said it's tonight?"

_"Ah, I see,"_ Jordi commented. _"It's like that, huh?"_

"Jordi…"

_"Here it comes."_

"You aren't working for the Club, are you?"

Jordi huffed, _"That sounds like a trick question. What do you think?"_

"… tonight," Pearce amended.

_"Because 'nothing' goes down tonight involving the Club?"_

"Yeah."

There was a long pause before Jordi answered. _"No, not tonight, incidentally."_

"Good," Pearce said, took the phone from his ear and hung up before Jordi had a chance to pry more. Perhaps he was being unfair on Jordi and Jordi wouldn't have been opportunistic in the same way he hadn't revealed anything about Heather Quinn, despite the good money he could've made from it. Jordi was wrong, he was choosing sides every time he refused to move against Pearce and he'd been doing it for years. They were merely keeping up appearances, which was why Jordi wasn't going to be on this gig.

Slowing down somewhat as he drove through the residential area, Pearce called Mia.

"All set?"

_"All set,"_ Mia confirmed. She hadn't originally been happy about being left behind, but she'd finally accepted his logic. If they both went, they'd have to handle the network aspect while they were on the move, relying only on the computing power of phones. Division of labour was the smarter choice. Mia could control the separate strands of surveillance and hacking while he took the immediate heat. The alternative would've been to hire someone else, either as backup for Pearce himself or as a hacker in Mia's stead and he hadn't liked the odds of it. He didn't have enough time to vet them thoroughly and waiting longer would just put everything else in jeopardy.

"Give me a rundown. Manpower first."

_"All right. Kenneth Quinn has a security force of six personnel. Two patrols of two are in the garden, two are on the ground floor in the house. They're armed with handguns. Officially, they're employed by Taurus, a security company owned, a few times removed, by Club associates. They're linked up with the in-house security system and have a whole damn private army ready to go."_

"Yeah, that's why you'll hijack that panic button."

_"No backup for them,"_ Mia agreed, a grin in her voice. _"I'm ready to block all 911 calls from the area, too, just in case."_

Pearce drove past High Grove, but ignored the closed gate. Traffic was thinning and when the turned into Battery Heights, there was barely any of it left. Some of the villas in the area were brightly lit, he came past one which apparently hosted a party of some kind, but none of them bothered him. Large gardens separated the luxurious houses, suppressed gunfire wouldn't be loud enough to be heard that far.

"In-house security system," Pearce prompted.

_"Motion sensors on the fence and outer gates and all outside doors. They're deactivated for balcony doors on the upper floors, though. There's video surveillance on all floors, the garden and the garage. It's night-vision enabled and backs up a record locally and on a Taurus server. But it's set to a privacy mode where cameras are turned off whenever Kenneth Quinn enters a room. Which is bad, because I have no idea what he's doing, but it's also good because I'll always know where he is."_

"Mics?"

_"Only in ground floor hallways,"_ Mia said. _"Probably a good idea if they're going to talk business, right?"_

"Yeah," Pearce agreed dryly. "It'd make sense if they didn't all carry phones. What else?"

_"Kenneth Quinn's staff has gone home for the night, so it's just him and his guards, he's currently in the third-floor bathroom. Which, by the way, is bigger than my whole apartment. Crime pays, eh?"_

"So I heard."

_"I've run a background check on the security people, they've all got the story you'd expect, but nothing stands out.I mean, except for the remarkable collection of violent crime records they have. I know it's a bit late to ask that, but are you sure you can handle them?"_

Pearce chuckled a little, "Do they know I'm coming?"

_"No-o,"_ Mia said. _"It looks all quiet. I'm ready to switch to looped video and now… I'm patching your phone in to the in-house system."_

Pearce heard the confirmation chime in his ear, but didn't take the phone away to check. With the patch, his commands would override all commands from other remotes and Mia could block any direct input into the system.

_"The system's going to raise an alarm if it can't profile your face, so I fed it one of your 'springbreak' profiles, but you'll have to turn the scrambler off."_

He lowered the phone, put the earpiece in with one hand while he loaded the virtual map of the villa. A quick scan revealed that none of the security people were carrying phones, they were only connected to the in-house system. Unfortunately, this meant their location would update with a lag of up to a minute, and many things could happen in that timespan. He found one phone on the third floor, but it was in sleep mode, he assumed it was Kenneth's. He'd check it out later.

He made a quick sweep of the neighbourhood in general, but only skimmed through the information, satisfied when nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Starting the engine, he said, "Ready?"

_"Ready, I'm feeding them the loop,"_ Mia said then made a sound of surprise. _"Uh, it's not… Come on, what's wrong? Wait, ah, now it's in. You're good to go."_

"You sure?"

_"Yeah, laggy connection, but I've fixed it."_

"Open the gate when I say so," Pearce said.

Working in tandem with Mia was convenient, at the very least. He didn't have to keep an eye on his phone constantly, neither to monitor his surroundings nor to make the environment work for him. He had both hands free, if he needed them and could just tell Mia if he needed something done. She enjoyed that side of things, undisturbed by the moral repercussions of what she was doing while the screen and the network provided a buffer for her consciousness.

He accelerated the car and said, "Open."

The gate unlocked quietly and slid smoothly back on expensive motors, he couldn't hear them over the roar of the car. It closed just as smoothly behind him and he followed the short gravel path to the front door of the villa.

_"Garden guards didn't notice,"_ Mia informed him. _"And… uh, none of them did."_

Turning off the scrambler, Pearce smirked a little as he got out of the car, stood in the open in front of the steps leading to the door. He could've climbed over a fence in the garden, manipulating the sensors there. He could have lured the guards away from the house, or into another part of it while he climbed in through a window. A balcony above the pool was covered in wooden trellis for ivy to grown on, he could climb it easily and scale the wall from there using the decorative panelling.

Or, he unlocked the front door and walked in. The lights were on, though with just a gentle low glow, bathing the wide hallway in soft shadows. He stopped a moment to listen and give Mia a chance to check her video feeds, but everything was silent.

He walked cautiously, but quickly through the hallway to where his phone said the two guards were, but they had already changed position. If they followed their routine, they were at the back of the house now, dining room and library.

The carpeted stairs were silent under his boots and the only indication of his passing was the way the lights lit up for him in the way they would for anyone authorised to be on the premises. Even if someone saw it, no one would assume an intruder.

When he reached the first floor, Mia said, _"Kenneth Quinn's still in the bathroom, guards are still clueless,"_ she laughed. _"I can't believe you just walked in there."_

"Between you and me, your method of home defense is far more effective," Pearce advised quietly.

_"Hard to hack a baseball bat,"_ Mia laughed.

The lights fell away from him as he passed, climbed the stairs to the second floor as swiftly as the first. Quiet music spilled out into the hallway and filled the floor. Pearce stopped on top of the stairs to listen, traced it to the open door at the end of the hallway, where Kenneth Quinn's gaming room was.

Pearce glanced down at his phone, but the network was still running in normal mode. Guard locations had updated, the two in the garden would spot his car in a few minutes and he should be on his way out by then.

From the second floor, a spiral staircase lead up to the third floor's open gallery. He looked up to scan the gallery, but the soft light that had come on revealed nothing suspicious.

_"Kenneth Quinn's still in the bath,"_ Mia informed him, paused, then added, _"I still have connectivity issues, I'm not sure what's causing them. I_ think _the in-house software isn't designed to be operated remotely, but does that make sense? Blume likes to have that kind of access don't they?"_

He didn't like the sound of that, but only grunted a vague affirmative and Mia got the hint, stopped talking and allowed him to concentrate.

Drawing his gun, Pearce slipped to the spiral staircase, it groaned when he took the first step and continued to hound him with the sound. He hoped the music would hide it, or else Kenneth Quinn didn't have the presence of mind to realise it heralded a threat.

_"I can't see you anymore,"_ Mia announced. _"I don't want to override Quinn's own signal."_

An open-floor bedroom spanned the gallery, furnished and decorated in some kind of modernised Asian style, cutting off portions with paper-covered screens and the glass block wall of the bathroom. He approached it quickly, unwilling to waste more time.

The spiral staircase groaned, the way it'd done when he'd stepped on it before. He snapped his attention back around and the room around him fell into sharper focus. It gave him time to recount all the tiny warning signs and connect them to each other. How quiet it was, that there was no steam or sound of water, no scent from the bath. Mia's connectivity issues and her perpetual blind spot for active resistance to her hacking efforts. How everything had been too damn quiet and too damn easy until this point.

He saw the movement, but he'd stepped too close to a paper screen and whoever was hiding behind, so when the man came from the shadows, Pearce had time to remember and think all of this, but his body's reaction lagged behind a crucial instant.

The man gripped his wrist and slammed it back into the glass wall, broke his hold on the gun and it fell clattering to the floor. Pearce managed a half-step aside, an awkward move, even if he'd had space to do it, and froze when the barrel of a gun pressed into the soft flesh under his jaw.

In the stillness that followed, Pearce's gaze connected with the other man's, recognised not only him — Carl Herrick — but also the look in his eyes and the stony set of his face. Herrick was no stranger to violence, but unlike many of that predilection, Pearce was fairly sure Herrick had been professionally trained at taxpayer's expense. Herrick wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger and never waste another thought on it afterward.

Pearce relaxed his body just slightly, enough to let Herrick know he didn't have to expect any immediate resistance. It allowed his spiked breathing and heartbeat to return to normal, gave him a chance to survey the scene. The earpiece was still in his ear, albeit a little out of place. Mia said nothing, she probably hadn't noticed something was wrong yet.

While she remained oblivious and Pearce returned Herrick's gaze steadily, the spiral staircase complained quietly as several people filed into the room. Most with Taurus security gear, some with the more casual clothes of Club enforcers and then the elegantly swaggering person of Kenneth Quinn.

"Now that was easy," he said, waved a hand airily. "If I'd known, I'm sure we could've arranged it sooner."

They'd _tried,_ though, more than once. If it'd been _easy,_ it'd have worked much sooner. But while that truth might soothe his ego, it helped little, now that he had sprung the trap.

_"What the…?"_ Mia said in his ear, full of confusion and dawning realisation. _"Shit,"_ she concluded a moment later.

Kenneth Quinn narrowed his eyes, "What's your problem with my family anyway?" he asked. "My father, my brother, you abduct my wife. You disrupt my business at every turn. Can't you live and let live a little?"

Pearce trailed his gaze away from Herrick with slow deliberation, focussed on Kenneth Quinn, but didn't answer, it was just rhetoric.

"Well," Kenneth Quinn said. "It didn't have to come to this, you know, but you brought it on yourself. All that time when you were running around Chicago as if you owned it? Well, it's really not yours. It's always belonged to the South Club. It's time we got rid the vermin. But I want you to know, you never mattered all that much anyway."

He made a dismissive gesture. "You were just a minor annoyance."

Turning to go, he said to his men, "Take him to the basement to shoot him, I don't want the mess in my bedroom."

He went down the stairs and some of his security followed him, leaving five men behind, in addition to Herrick.

Herrick eased the pressure of the gun, but didn't take it away completely.

"Are you going to make it difficult?" he asked. He did his best to keep his voice neutral, but a sneer crept in behind it.

Pearce blinked his attention back to him and let the growing tension wrap around him, waited it out as the moment neared its tipping point.

"Do you want me to?" Pearce asked, felt the pressure of the gun against his throat as he spoke, let it force his voice into a growl of his own. "It's no fun if they don't fight back, is it?" he added. "How'd they know you're better then them?"

He raised his voice a little, he wanted the others to hear him, too. Herrick might think this was between them, it worked for his internal narrative, but Pearce was performing for a larger audience.

"Talk tall all you like," Pearce continued. "But you all run scared of me."

He leaned forward, into the gun, the faintest of movement so as not to provoke Herrick's trigger finger.

"Are _you_ scared of me?"

Herrick's expression darkened subtly, invisible to the men behind him, but obvious to Pearce. Herrick suspected some kind of trick, he knew he had the upper hand right now and letting go of it was an obviously stupid choice. But he was running the muscle for Heather — and now for Kenneth Quinn — ripe with macho culture and meaningless posturing. Herrick would have to defend his place in the hierarchy at every step, make sure all the young contenders knew why he was in charge. Levelling the challenge at him, in this way, in front of his men, meant he'd seem weak and cowardly if he backed down and pocketed the safe win.

Reluctantly, Herrick folded his finger away from the trigger and stepped back, lowered the gun only halfway to the floor. Keeping his gaze on Pearce, he took a step to the side and kicked Pearce's gun in the direction of his men. One of them went to pick it up and when he straightened, Herrick was holding his own gun out to him.

Tilting his head towards his men, Herrick said, "Keep out of it."

Pearce bared his teeth, settled a leg against the wall behind and launched himself at Herrick, weaving an element of of surprise out of thin air.

Herrick's reaction was immediate, but he didn't have enough time to bring up his guard all the way and Pearce landed a punch against the side of his jaw with the full weight of his body behind it. Pearce felt it all the way into his shoulder when they connected, but while Herrick staggered, he didn't go down.

Herrick landed several blows to Pearce's face, then a hard quick jab to his side before he could muster a defence and deflected a blow from the left. Fighting through the daze, Pearce caught Herrick's fist, used the leverage and stepped into Herrick's knee for the satisfying hiss of pain from his opponent. Twisting away to keep on his feet, Herrick threw himself around, arm raised and elbow ready to smash into Pearce's sternum. Pearce dropped back, took the blow into the shoulder instead, where it failed to do much damage, but at the same time, Herrick smashed his left fist into the side of Pearce's face, knocking him back.

Herrick didn't give him a chance to recover from the momentary disorientation, got hold of his arms and turned them both, hooked his feet with Pearce's and toppled him over. Pearce heard himself snarl like an animal when the world tilted away.

Gracelessly, Pearce rolled away, on all fours and back on his feet, stumbling through a paper screen, gaining a few inches of breathing space while Herrick ripped the piece of furniture out of his way.

Taking on Herrick had always been a risky move. He could have taken his chances on the way to the basement. The spiral staircase was the most promising choke-point, but he couldn't be sure to take Herrick down fast enough, even if he took him by surprise. This way, at least, the others weren't going to interfere. Pearce only hoped he was in any shape to handle them when it was over.

Keeping low, Pearce let Herrick come to him, taking the moment to watch the man's body language and anticipate the direction of his attack. Despite his bulk, Herrick was fast and despite running with thugs now, he was precise. No sloppiness in the way he came for him, no hesitation and a willingness to work through pain.

He ducked past Pearce's defence and got a decent hold on him, grunted when Pearce punched his elbow in his side, but Herrick's grip was iron, trying to manoeuvre Pearce so he could run him into the wall. Pearce kicked out, hit the same knee again and Herrick stumbled for a second. Pearce used the moment, got hold of the man's hand and held on, twisted out of his grip and Herrick snarled when the move nearly disjointed his shoulder. Pulling up, Pearce snapped his elbow back again, caught Herrick in the nose and a second time at the side of his head, he followed up by yanking his knee up and into Herrick's groin, doubling him over. Every instinct in Pearce screamed for him to use the moment and finish Herrick there and then. But not while the others were still watching.

Herrick tried to draw back for a breather of his own, Pearce kept the pressure on, swiped his feet away from under him. Instead of letting him fall, though, Pearce picked him up by the back of the neck and a hold on his shoulder. Threw him forward and into the glass door leading to the roof deck. It didn't break under the impact, but the door jarred out of its lock, swinging open lazily and letting in a gust of damp, cool air.

Pearce stole a quick look at Herrick's men. They had scattered around the room, keeping out of the way while the fight was still going. Their postures were tense, but they were keeping still for now.

By then, Herrick had worked through the pain, spat a curse as he pulled himself up. Pearce aimed a kick at his stomach, but Herrick caught his boot and twisted hard, tore Pearce from his feet. He fell into the window, hit his shoulder on the doorway as he caught himself. He snapped his hand forward, got hold of the door and crashed it into Herrick's face. This time, the glass shattered, leaving numerous tiny, bleeding cuts in Herrick's face.

Herrick jumped forward, chopped Pearce arm out of the way and got a grip on his throat, smashed him back into the doorway on an outstretched arm.

Pearce hacked his arm down on Herrick's, loosened the grip and ducked down past him, making for the roof deck. Herrick had moved with him, though, tripped him and got a hold of his shoulder. It wasn't a good grip, so Herrick just shoved him forward with full force and into the cast iron table and chairs there. Pearce got hold of the edge of the table, pulled himself up and kicked his leg back, got Herrick on the chest with his heel. Pearce vaulted over the table, picked up one of the metal chair's as he landed and came back up, brought it around just in time to crash it into Herrick full force, but Herrick snapped a hand up, diverted the blow with a grip on the chair leg and a hard yank to the side.

The others hadn't followed outside yet.

Herrick had never got around to pat him down for weapons and while his gun was well out of reach and his phone useless inside the house, he still had the baton.

Using the second Herrick tangled with the chair, Pearce drew the baton from his pocket, snapped it open with a move familiar and effortless. He dove forward just as Herrick did, but the length of steel made all the difference as Pearce snapped it down into the side of Herrick's leg, then into his side and then in a small circle up and against his arms. Instinctively, Herrick lunged for the baton to keep it away from his face. Pearce turned it in his hand and crushed the handle into Herrick's temple.

Herrick folded sideways, found the table for support, but Pearce stepped in close, settled a hand on top of his head and yanked it back, exposing his throat.

Herrick's eyes were wide open, gaze connecting with Pearce's for a endless second, realisation of what was coming next blowing his pupils wide, arms coming up, but ineffectively against the downward stroke of the baton against his throat.

Gargling wetly, Herrick went limp, larynx fractured.

"The fuck…?!" someone yelled.

Pearce dropped like a stone behind the bulk of Herrick's aimlessly twitching body and kept drawing backward in the time it took the others to file out to the deck and draw their guns.

The first shot hissed past his head, far too close for comfort and there was no good cover anywhere on the deck. Just a few heavy planters surrounding a hot tub, covered by a sheet of plastic in the winter. Looking around, Pearce mapped the only way he could go. Jumping up, he got the back edge of the hot tub, launched himself forward and scaled the roof. With a flat decline, he could walk comfortably, but it wasn't bulletproof and standing up made him a good target, even in the shadow.

He ran along the length of the roof, felt bullets bite through the eaves at his heels. He spotted only three men out on the deck, the others must be hanging back inside. With no time to hesitate, to think about how small his time frame was, Pearce dropped back down close to the three men, behind the backs of two of them, while the third had advanced towards where Herrick still lay. Whether he was alive or already dead, Pearce neither knew nor cared.

Pearce rolled back to his feet, swung the baton into the nearest man's back and when he arched with the blow, Pearce came up behind him, caught the man's gun from his fingers. A shot went clean through the man's side before Pearce could shove him aside and the bullet singed Pearce's sleeve.

He raised the gun and fired down the deck at the other two, got one in the chest. The second bullet sheered past the second man's throat, cut it wide open.

Pearce dropped the human shield, it was mostly useless and only hindered him. Without wasting time on aiming, Pearce fired into the bedroom in a wide circle, forcing the remaining two men to take cover.

Counting off the bullets, when he fired the last two, he took a running start, swiped a second gun from the ground as he went. In the moment it took the others to realise he'd stopped firing, he had oriented themselves, brought his gun back up and fired twice more, dropping them.

The sudden silence thundered in his ears, made his own breathing seem ridiculously loud and for a moment he just stood in the centre of the room, detached from the carnage strewn around him.

His jaw ached, from the blows he'd taken, but mostly from how tightly he clenched his teeth, still bared from the fight. The razor-edge of his sense picked up a faint sound and he remembered he'd lost his earpiece at some point he couldn't recall. He couldn't spot it, so he simply pulled out his phone.

"Mia," he said, forced his voice into a semblance of normalcy.

_"Oh god, Pearce,"_ she exclaimed. _"I don't know how it happened! I swear I'll figure it out! I… Are you all right?"_

"I know how it happened," he said darkly.

_"Shit,"_ Mia said. _"Shit, shit."_

He took a steadying breath, snapped the baton closed and put it away. Dropping the gun, he went to where his own was lying on the floor.

"Where's Kenneth?" he asked.

_"You're still going after him?"_

"He thinks I'm dead," Pearce pointed out. The house felt deserted now, unlike when he'd come, but he still took a moment to listen before he went down the stairs. He was in no mood for more nasty surprises.

_"I…"_ Mia started and sounded like she was deflating. _"Are you pissed with me?"_

"Where's Kenneth?" Pearce repeated, a little sharper.

It took an additional moment until Mia said, _"He left after his little speech to you. Soon after, the cameras in your area stopped backing up their footage. I'm only getting a live feed and I think some of the cameras are out completely."_

Pearce thought about it. The cameras had a maintenance mode where they'd not record. He used it sometimes as a low-impact way to hide his movement.

_"Something else is going on, isn't it?"_ Mia asked in a tone of voice like she suspected he'd blame her for that, too, whatever it turned out to be.

"I don't know," he said. He'd reached the ground floor and found his car was still there. The plan would've been to sink him and the car in the Chicago river and forget the vigilante had ever existed.

An alert announced he'd received a message.

"Wait," he told Mia and took the phone down to check. The message said: _(3542 N Belarbre Ave)_

The address wasn't far away. Making up his mind, Pearce got back into his car. When he was moving, he said, "Mia?"

_"Shit, I'm sorry Pearce…"_

"Stand by, maybe I'll still need you," he said and hung up without giving her a chance to argue.

It didn't take long until he turned into Belarbre. A gentle slope let upward, hid the address from sight. There was no traffic, it was a wealthy area in the middle of the night, far from the bustle of the city so it was, perhaps, no surprise that the car that'd hit a streetlight hadn't attracted attention yet, especially if ctOS wasn't fully operational.

A modern station wagon had hit a lamppost and knocked it askew. A thin line of smoke trailed upward from the front, but nothing else moved. The lamp had failed due to the impact. Pearce parked a little distance away and got out, surveyed the scene and listened in the night for any sign of new problems, but he already had his suspicions of what to expect.

Satisfied, he tucked his hands into the pockets of his coat and strode across the street, approached the car. From behind, it looked like an accident. Some drunk driver losing control of their vehicle, getting knocked unconscious with the impact. Without any visible tyre-tracks, it was impossible to gauge the speed the car had been going at. Fairly fast, given the model. 

Pearce circled the car and as he got closer, the blood sprayed on the inside of the windows became visible. He stopped by the front fender, regarded the damage for what it truly was. The windshield was covered in a million tiny cracks, rendering it almost intransparent. On head height, two bullet holes punctured the windshield, one for each passenger. The window on the driver's side had fallen out, opened the view on the two occupants. A bullet had hit the driver right between the eyes, killing him instantly. A second bullet had punched through Kenneth Quinn's right eye.

Smiling a little, Pearce pulled out his phone again, scrolled through the apps until he found what he'd been looking for, then texted back: _(Thanks Jordi)_

* * *

On the drive back to the Loop, Pearce felt the way the adrenaline drained from his body with each new point of pain it revealed. His face was sore, it felt hot where the bruises formed and a leaden weight threatened to settle on his neck. He pushed it aside, straightened in his seat to counteract the encroaching tiredness. He acceralted the car and a little rush came flooding back. 

He called Mia.

She seemed to have calmed down by then, but markedly less upbeat than usual.

_"I think I know what happened,"_ she said. _"They must've known we were coming. They were running their own video on a loop long before I ever got in and they switched it back to live using the remote's privacy setting. That way, I saw you in the cameras, but everything else was fake. That's why it lagged."_

"Yeah," Pearce confirmed without adding anything.

_"But how did they know?"_

"Iain," Pearce guessed. "Trying to get back into the Club's good graces. I should've checked him."

Mia paused, then said, _"I couldn't find Kenneth Quinn in the live feeds, but I'm sure he'll crop back up. Do you think it'll be hard to take him out now?"_

The solidity of the car and the powerful sound of the engine felt different now than it had before and the car seemed to resist him more.

Perhaps he was just tired.

"Kenneth Quinn is dead," he answered. 

_"What? How did you find him?"_

"I didn't."

Mia said nothing, clearly trying to process the information. Pearce interrupted her line of thought and said, "Mia, you need to go home…"

_"But I…"_

"… and get some sleep."

_"But…"_

"It's fine, it worked," he stated, but realised he failed to put much warmth in his tone. "Consider it a learning experience, alright?"

Mia took a deep breath, almost as if she was about to argue. Instead, she said, _"Okay, I hear you. So… where are you heading?"_

"Shower and sleep."

_"Uh, Heather spoke up,"_ Mia said. _"She wants to know what happened. And she really wants a drink. What do I tell her?"_

He thought about it, longer than strictly necessary, because he found the hum of the engine and the speed of the car remarkably comforting. Iain was the most likely leak, but he hadn't known any details, certainly not enough to for Kenneth Quinn's nearly flawless trap. There were still missing pieces in this, more than there should be.

"I'll take care of her," he finally answered. "Just go home."


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **General Note:** I hate it when specific warnings take the shape of spoilers. You want to know what happens, go and fucking read it. However, I'm aware that some people do not wish to read certain things and it seems unnecessarily callow to forego warnings entirely. Therefore, **_Reader Discretion Advised_** is catch-all for the nasty things that'd happen. This includes, among others, _torture_ and _gore, disembowelment, dismemberment, rape_ and every other _non-consensual_ thing ever, _character death, cannibalism_ in varying degrees of explicitness. It's a cover-my-arse warning, too, because I usually have no idea how to rate my own stuff. (Sex has no place on that list and I'll clench my teeth and keep warning you prudes whenever it happens.) 
> 
> **Author's Note:** In a minor forth wall breach, when I tried to figure out whether it was 'wine shop' or 'wine store', google offered me the relevant places in Chicago. Yes, Big Brother is watching, I know. 
> 
> **Sorry** about the length of this thing, I have no idea why I couldn't get to the point (even the damned author's notes are endless). I know it leaves a few threads hanging, but I believe it's quite clear what'll happen next. 
> 
> **Recap/Recurring Character:** Poppy and Vincent Fisher's story can be found in Loose Ends. 

Heather had been browsing channels on the television for hours. Without access to the internet – no phones, no computers – the TV was her only source of information. She doubted anything of Pearce's operation would've leaked. If Kenneth Quinn died, alleged mob boss of the Chicago South Club, the DA and the police would sit on it for as long as they could. There would not be anything about any of it on the television tonight, she knew that. Yet, it was all she had to keep her company in her enforced passivity.

The hacker girl had been evasive and short when they'd spoken, Heather had already made an uneasy peace with remaining in the dark for at least another day. She hadn't expected Pearce.

Curled up on the couch with an energy drink, she only turned her head to watch him walk in after the metallic hiss of the lock had alerted her.

He looked battered, bruises in his face and a subtle heaviness in his movement she hadn't seem him exhibit before. Seeing him made a lump form in her throat, unexpected and restricting, something unseen snapped in her thoughts and she didn't know if it was a good or bad feeling. If he was here, then Kenneth must be dead, there was no other way it could've gone.

He stopped, looked back at her and Heather slipped to her feet, walked to face him. Closer now, the shadow of his cap revealed the reflected glow of his eyes, rendering his gaze penetrating and intense in his silence.

Wordlessly, he held out the paper bag he held in his hand. For a moment, she preferred to be transfixed by his gaze, but then trailed her attention down to the bag, spotted the logo of some wine store on it. When she took the bag from his hands, it was heavy, the weight of two bottles and their packaging.

She looked up at him, smiled thinly and said, "You're welcome to some of my fresh bandages."

He surprised her when a smile lit his features, quick like distant lightning. He didn't answer, but walked past her, peeled off his coat and dropped it over the back of a couch as he went towards the bathroom.

She took the bag to the kitchenette, pulled out the bottles and raised an appreciative eyebrow as she read the labels. It was a bottle of imported vodka, labelled only in Cyrillic and she didn't recognise the brand. The other bottle was a Pinot noir from Oregon, too excellent to just knock back before it had a chance to breathe, but the wine appealed much more to her.

Uncorking the bottle of red with her damaged hand wasn't easy, sending pulsing pain up her arm as she applied some force. She winced, then composed herself, listened for a moment to Pearce in the bathroom.

By the time Pearce returned, she had found two wine glasses in the sparsely outfitted kitchen. She turned and held a glass out to him.

He'd taken off his cap and the sweater, leaving him in white T-shirt, but a flew flecks of dried blood were still visible on his trousers. He'd washed his hands and face and combed his hair back haphazardly with his fingers. His eyes were still as bright as before, though. Perhaps they always were and she just hadn't noticed.

He didn't reach for the glass.

"Please," she said quietly. "Tell me about Kenneth."

His expression barely softened, but he nodded and took the glass. He walked to the couch and after a moment's hesitation, she took the wine bottle and followed, selecting her seat carefully across from him.

"You have good taste," she remarked, lifting her glass in salute before she drank. The wine was still too cold to be truly good, but at least it had some burn and texture in it, a welcome change and equally welcome, if fleeting, distraction from the situation she found herself in.

He said nothing, but returned her gesture before he drank.

Despite herself, she didn't want to break this silence, finding herself chasing memories she hadn't looked at in a long time. She and Kenneth had grown apart in the last few years, more a flawless business relationship than a marriage, but if she told herself that it had always been about ambition, she'd just be lying.

"So, he's dead," she finally said, surprised by the way the word felt on her tongue.

"Took a bullet to the head," Pearce said. "Carl Herrick and some of his men are also dead."

"Herrick?" she asked and considered whether she should say anything more. In the end, she decided she'd gone too far already and if Herrick was dead, it didn't matter anymore anyway. "You got lucky, then."

"Yeah," he said with a mirthless chuckle. "Felt like it."

She frowned a little, "I don't know what you mean, but Herrick would've become a power of his own, especially in a vacuum without Kenneth or me. He's brought in a lot of his old army buddies, but I always thought they were more loyal to him than to the Club."

"Where will they stand?"

"His army buddies? With us, don't expect them to turn tail, but they are mostly followers, not leaders."

Pearce thought for a moment, took a sip, then said, "Who is?"

Heather laughed and shook her head, "Some other time," she said and drank.

Pearce, she realised, had a knack for silence, for letting it be choking and tense or comfortable and peaceful instead. This was something in-between the two extremes, but it suited them both. For a moment, she almost forgot why she was here at all, adrift inside her own mind.

She caught herself, the sigh escaped her only half, nothing more than a gesture. She said, "Kenneth wasn't all bad, you know."

Pearce didn't answer, only looked at her over the rim of his glass, his expression unreadable. His knuckles were bruised, skin pulled taunt to his bones, holding the glass.

"I don't have to tell you my history, I guess you dug up parts I've long forgotten," she continued and putting any bitterness into her voice seemed too much effort. "I worked as a shop assistant at a jeweller's shop. I didn't graduate high school, but I'm not stupid and my face has good bone structure. The Club bought the shop from the owner's widower. It's when I first met Kenneth."

She had to smile a little at the memory. "You called him a trust-fund kid, others would be less kind. But with me, he was almost shy. I guess it's different, when the feeling is real. When it's not just… you know, lust and ownership."

She fell silent, realising her gaze had drifted away from him, chasing after intangible memories in mid-air. When she looked back at Pearce, she found he hadn't moved other than lower the glass.

"And then suddenly you're in the upper echelons of the Chicago South Club."

She made a dismissive gesture. "You don't have to agree, but I believe that certain things will always happen. There'll always be bankers ripping off poor pensioners, there'll always be twelve-year-olds dead in a drive-by. There'll always be dealers, corrupted cops and incompetent politicians. If it's not me doing these things, it'd just be someone else. And I wanted it to be me, judge me all you like for it."

"If Kenneth hadn't loved you," Pearce said. "You could've been sold at an auction. Niall did to an ex-girlfriend."

"I remember her," she said. "But she was a dumb bitch. After she'd broken up with Niall, she tried to blackmail him. What was he supposed to do?"

Pearce's expression darkened and Heather shook her head, distancing herself from what she'd said.

"If things had been different, yes," she echoed the sentiment and fixed him sharply. She didn't say that she wouldn't have been as stupid as Niall's ex, the point seemed entirely moot. "If things had been different, maybe it'd have been you organising the auction. The point is, things aren't different. I decided what my life was going to be like, I threw my lot in with the Quinns. Good and evil are just stories for children."

"There's plenty of evil."

She tilted her head, lightly, said, "There's you adding to it."

"Well," he grunted. "If not me, than just someone else, right?"

She had to laugh a little, "Touché."

They emptied their glasses without saying anything more.

Heather tapped her glass against her lower lip, then, abruptly, shook herself from her detachment. She slipped to the edge of the couch and reached for the bottle, tilted it a little towards him in question. He held out the glass across the table between them, settled back again with his refill and took a long gulp.

After a while, she said, "Would you be offended if I asked you what your price was?"

Pearce took another sip of wine before he answered. When he finally spoke, his tone was dark, making the empty air between them shiver with tension.

"Not offended," he said eventually and fell silent again.

She felt a smile tucking at the corners of her mouth and asked, "What's your price?"

To her surprise, Pearce seemed to consider the question rather than just brush it aside. Instead, he leaned forward, hung an arm over his knee and took a deep breath.

"Unmake the last six years," he said.

She only nodded, she hadn't expected anything less than an impossible demand from him.

He took another deep breath, rubbed his eye as he sat back up and blinked a few more times as he leaned back, squared his shoulders and took another sip. She drank, too, watching him.

"It doesn't matter," he said slowly.

"I'm pretty sure it does."

"Not for you," he said, in a tone that warned her away from pressing the point.

"No, I suppose not," she said.

She refilled their glasses a second time, savouring the wine now that it had reached room temperature. In the quiet, she caught Pearce letting his eyes fall closed until he seemed to sense her attention and snapped them open again.

"You know, it's a good trick," she said as if the thought had just occurred to her, when in truth, she had had too much time to ponder it. "Being this man of mystery. I'm long past trying to write you and your role in Chicago off. You scoff at me and the Club and all of us, but you yourself are a power here, too."

"It's not the same," he warned, made simultaneously better and worse by the slow smirk that accompanied his answer.

She just waved her hand in dismissal. "That's not the point. Everything about you is an unknown. I've looked you up online, like _everyone_ in this town has done. And I thought 'how clever'. Someone else with your skill-set, they would've been tempted to erase themselves from the system." She pointed at him with her glass. "But _you_ , you didn't, you knew it wouldn't last. Instead, the net is full of false information. So much of it, no one knows anymore what the truth is."

He'd sunk a little into the couch, lifted his head when she stopped speaking and took a second longer until he really seemed to focus on her.

"Are you coming on to me?"

"I try not to make the same mistake twice," she laughed. "But it must be hard to keep track of all that. Do you sometimes forget what you really are?"

He chuckled. The glass in his hand had started to tip to the side, but he noticed just in time and sat up too quickly, grunted in irritation. A slow frown settled on his face.

"No," he said seriously, then started to chuckle. "Actually, it's kind of fun."

With the glass against her lips, Heather joined in after a moment.

"I'm…uh," he started and stopped, frowned again when he seemed to lose the thread. He sat up and blinked, rubbed his hand down his face.

She wasn't sure if it was a prompt or not, so she kept her silence, returned his smile and tracked his movement. He set the glass down on the table and got up, took two steps until he was past the couch, then tripped and had to steady himself with a grip to the back of the couch. It took only a moment, but he crossed the space to his desk with a certain caution.

Heather felt herself tense, wondered if he would notice her changed posture. He didn't turn on the computers, though, he crouched down by the desk, took something from a drawer she couldn't see. It took a little effort to pull himself back to his feet, but he covered for it by leaning against the desk in a decent show of nonchalance.

"Perhaps you should stay here tonight," she offered mildly and added with a smile. "I promise your virtue is safe."

"Hmm."

She watched him across the room, saw the effort it took him to appear composed, but something burning was filling his gaze.

"What if I wanted it unsafe?"

Startled, despite herself, she sat up, about to get to her feet, but then thought better of it. She lowered her glass, tilted her head back a little. Unbidden, the lump in her throat returned, albeit for an entirely different reason.

"You'll have to come a little closer for that," she said, tone carefully neutral.

Pearce remained leaned into the desk for a long moment, gathering himself before he pushed himself to his feet. He'd learned from his earlier stumble and set his feet much more carefully as he walked back, a slow casualness masking his unsteadiness. It should make him appear much more harmless than normal, but instead there was an accidental, predatory grace in his movement as he focussed on the functioning of each individual muscle.

She shifted back a little, still unsure if she should've got up as he approached, because he was towering, stepping in between the couch and the table and she had to drop her head back to look up to him. A thin sheen of sweat was on his forehead and his expression had turned from smiling to tense.

He settled a knee on the couch beside her, mindful of his unreliable sense of balance. Everything about him was intense, but slowed down with the effort of keeping his gaze pinned on her.

She never had a chance to deflect him when he snapped his hand forward, folded steely fingers around her throat, pulled her up an inch by that grip alone, then crushed her down into the couch. Sharp pain cut from her stomach all the way to her throat as the injury in her side overstrained, it wrung a strangled cry from her and paralysed her until the rush of adrenaline numbed the pain.

She punched for him blindly, hit his shoulder with her glass, it knocked out of her hand without doing much damage.

He didn't let up either, keeping her down with his weight rather than strength. Getting light-headed from lack of oxygen, her efforts weren't putting a dent in him, even though he was panting hard, leaned in over her with his weight not only to keep her pinned, but because his body wasn't following orders. Heaving, he let up for only a moment as he turned her around, crushed her face into the upholstery and laid his forearm over her neck.

"You spiked my drink," he hissed by her ear.

She immediately renewed her struggle, punched back with her elbow and felt him groan when she hit a fresh bruise, but it didn't make him let up. He twisted her caught hand and something cold and hard pressed against her wrist, she recognised it as a handcuff.

"Fuck you," she snarled, flailing her arm to keep it out of his reach. His fingers dug into the cuts at the palm of her hand, painful even through the bandage and he used the chance to close the cuffs. She felt the slight tremble in his arm across her neck, the way he fumbled for her other hand, he was losing the coordination to fight. She hacked her elbow back again, snapped her handcuffed hand from his grip. She shoved her hips up to the side and Pearce overbalanced on the edge of the couch. He tried to hold on to her, pulling her down, but she freed her legs and kicked up, caught him somewhere on the thigh with her heel.

She scrambled up, caught the back of the couch and pulled herself over. He made no attempt to follow. She circled the couch at a safe distance. Muttering a mangled curse, Pearce rolled to all fours, but didn't get back to his feet.

She followed the direction of his gaze and swiftly crossed forward, snatched his coat from the back of the couch before he could even try to go for it.

She watched him trying to stand, lose his grip andrealise he wasn't getting far. He'd made it past the couch, but the trembling of his shoulders revealed that he was losing the fight against the drug. He made a low, snarling sound in his throat, something between pain and anger. He managed to prop himself up against the side of the couch. In another attempt to push himself up, he pulled a knee in, but he slipped and was still after that.

Heather allowed herself to relax just a little, but she still kept away. Even when she wasn't underestimating him, he had still almost got the jump on her. Now she was thoroughly out of second chances with him, she saw it in his eyes even as he struggled to focus. She resolved not to let her guard down until she knew he was six feet under.

"Do you know what this is?" she asked, holding up the small packet. She wasn't sure if he was still coherent enough to understand. He'd let his head roll back to look at her. He had stopped trying to get up, but his gaze still tracked her as she circled him.

"Iain had it in his pocket when you brought him here," she continued. "You thought it was a condom."

She tore the packet open, dropped the wrapping carelessly, held the patch between pointed fingers and unfolded it until it was the size of a nicotine patch.

"We used to ink our girl with tracking devices that were developed by Blume, but this was our own invention. It's less permanent than a tattoo, but it works much the same. It activates when it touches skin."

She gave him no warning, stepped in close and yanked the collar of his shirt aside and slapped the patch against the side of his neck. She retreated immediately, before he had the chance to lung for her. Tension ran the length of his body, but it was the only indication he might even have done that.

He raised a hand, padded his neck, digging his nails in, but the patch had already transferred the trackers into his skin. After a few moments, he let his arm drop again. His eyes fluttered closed, opened again.

"I'd explain how it all fits together," Heather said. She strode back to the couch, picked up the bottle from where it lay on its side and held it up to the light to see how much had survived. The loose end of the handcuff hit the glass with a low sound.

"But you wouldn't remember anyway."

There was enough wine left to fill half a glass. She looked up at the nearest camera. She had no way to tell whether someone was watching or not, whether the hacker was already sending help, but Iain must have a pretty good idea of where she was and had people standing by. It was good enough for her.

She drank the rest of the wine while she waited.

* * *

Someone was punching him in the face, but it took a while until it worked itself to the top of his internal list of priorities. His world was swimming, a mess of throbbing headaches and crippling nausea. His limbs felt like they'd been detached at some point, leaving them numb and unresponsive. In that chaos, he was still chasing a sense of self and memories beyond flashes of sensory experience — the smell of exhaust fumes, the taste of duct tape — and somewhere, at the back of all of this, a reason for rage. 

Someone hit him again and the skin over his cheekbone split open wetly. He turned his head slowly, effort like pushing through water. He cracked open his eyes, already anticipating the sting of bright lights, but it still stabbed him all the way to the back of his skull, wringing a hoarse moan from him. It sounded distant and pathetic in his own ears.

"Give him a moment," a female voice said and his thoughts sparked brightly, dragging him back from the shallow water he'd been drowning in. A shadow was withdrawn from over him and the brightness shot right through his eyelids again, keeping him skewered.

"Fucker broke my nose," someone complained somewhere over and to the right of him.

"I told you to be careful," Heather Quinn said unimpressed. "I had to guess the dosage and it was a little too low to take him under completely."

She moved as she spoke, came closer to him until a shadow draped itself over his face again.

"On the upside, we can start work sooner."

Her hands dropped to his shoulders, too warm and heavy to stop himself from tensing under her grip. He blinked his eyes open reluctantly, only to look up into Heather's sharp blue eyes. The room behind her came into focus a little slower, corner of a ceiling and white walls, no visible decoration in the part he could see. His head rested on two metal bars, pressing uncomfortably into his skull no matter how he turned it.

It turned out, he was lying on what appeared to be a dental chair that had been stripped of any upholstery, leaving only a bare skeleton behind. Metal cuffs held his arms and feet, he didn't pull on them to test their strength, not while he was under so much scrutiny, but he didn't have high hopes anyway.

Heather smiled a little and it wasn't quite the cold expression he expected from her.

"How much do you remember?"

He returned her gaze, but then let it slip away to survey the rest of the room, spotted the man with the swollen nose off to the side and two others he vaguely recognised as Club muscle. Further to the back of the room was a simple table and a few chairs, where a woman sat behind a laptop screen. She seemed vaguely familiar, too, but Pearce couldn't place her immediately. Iain stood behind her shoulder, talking quietly. He glanced up briefly, but refused to make eye-contact with Pearce by pretending to watch the screen.

With his arms crossed over his chest, Vincent Fisher sat on the desk, looked back at Pearce and Heather with a smug little smile playing on his lips.

"I should've left you alone," Pearce said in answer to Heather's question, taking his gaze back to her. The nausea was abating somewhat, but the headache remained lodged behind his eyebrows like an iron bar.

Heather laughed, started and stopped just as abruptly.

"You haven't put it all together, have you?" she asked.

He bared his teeth, it was the best imitation of a smile he had. "You drugged me somehow. I guess Iain smuggled it in."

Her smile stayed. "Not that," she said. "Well, not _just_ that." She took her hands from his shoulder and straightened away from him. "How you got here, not just the drugs." She shrugged. "But you are right about them. But there's a part you've misunderstood from the beginning, from before you put Ramsey on my case."

"Who's the mole?" he asked.

"That's the wrong question," she said, shaking her head as she walked away. "I'll let you work it out on your own, I think you'll enjoy it more."

She paused, then said, "However, you're not going to enjoy what's coming too much. Believe it or not, I'm not a great fan of torture."

Pearce pulled on the handcuffs experimentally, but he wasn't sure if his muscles were just sluggish to respond or if the chair and his bindings were so tough.

"But you leave me no other options. I can't manipulate you, I can't buy you, I can't seduce you, I can't blackmail or threaten you," Heather continued.

She spread out her arms, a mockery of regret and said, "So, I'm going to destroy you."

"What do you want?"

She shook her head, "Oh no, you'll have to pretend to break much later, if you want it to be believable."

Pearce lifted his head, tried to find a slightly more comfortable spot on the metal. "You want access to my system," he stated. "What's it to you?"

She laughed again, "What's it _not_ to me. Lucky had a treasure trove of secrets, he had the mayor and Blume in his pocket and the gangs were jumping when he called. No one would mess with him, on both sides of the law. You ruined all that, I think it's only fair you made up for it."

While she'd talked, Fisher had got to his feet and came up behind Heather. She glanced at him and said, "I'm told you're old acquaintances."

She made a gesture toward the woman behind the laptop. "And that's Denise S—"

"Mrs Quinn," the woman interrupted and cleared her throat when Heather arched her brows and looked at her in mild surprise.

"I…" Denise said, took a breath and seemed to resolve something for herself. "I'd rather you didn't mention my name."

Pearce snorted and let his head drop. He already knew who she was, he'd stumbled over her while looking into the Quinns' affairs, she was an IT engineer and former DedSec member, ostensibly the social media and community manager for some of the Quinns' shell companies.

"Well," Heather said. "She's here to make sure you don't try to trick us."

Her expression hardened as she returned it to Pearce, but by then his mind had cleared somewhat and he returned her gaze calmly, ignoring Fisher's leer behind her shoulder. It gave her pause, if only for a second. In counterpoint to the stony mask of her face, her voice was sincere in its ruefulness.

"I have no interest in watching," she said, stepped away and Fisher made sure to get out of her way smoothly. She nodded at Fisher, than at Denise. "Just let me know when it's done."

Her heels clicked sharply as she left the room, Iain and the Club soldiers followed her out and the door snapped shut behind her with an echo of finality.

"Mrs Quinn isn't really bone-headed," Fisher said conversationally as he circled Pearce. "But when I said I couldn't really crack you, she wanted to hear nothing of it. Which is bad for me, because she _does_ expect results."

He stopped by Pearce's right side and leaned over him. "If you want my opinion, I believe by the time you're willing to talk, you'll be too incoherent to remember your own passwords."

"I don't want your opinion," Pearce said. He doubted he could talk himself out of it with Fisher. The man was too much in love with this game of power, he'd take every opportunity.

"But that's the beauty of it," Fisher chuckled. "You don't get a say in it."

He circled further, stopped on Pearce's other side and said, "How is my beautiful Poppy?"

Pearce arched a meaningful eyebrow, said nothing and pointedly turned his head away from Fisher. If the man wanted to talk his ears off, Pearce wouldn't stop him and, anyway, wasn't in any position to. But Fisher wasn't an idiot, giving him anything at all would only provide him with ammunition. There was no way he could know anything about Donna or her current location, Fisher was just trying to get a rise out of him and like Heather had said, it was too early for that.

From the corner of his eyes, Pearce watched Fisher as he dropped the affable mien. Wasting no more time, he walked past the length of Pearce's prone body until only his shadow served as a reminder of his presence. Pearce heard only the faintest whisper of clothes, but no real warning before Fisher brought the wire down over his throat.

His body went rigid instantly, the cuffs unrelenting on his wrists as he kept trying to bring his arms up and free his throat. Distantly, he knew he should try to relax to conserve oxygen and energy, but his brain bypassed any reasoning, dropped him into survival mode without transition, exposed him to all the stupid, blind, animal responses, which would only make it worse.

Fisher let up just as abruptly as he'd brought the wire down, just before the black spots at the corner of Pearce's vision had a chance to release him from this place. His body slumped back into the hard chair, dry coughs abrading his already sore throat.

Behind him, Fisher said, "Don't worry about any physical reactions, I won't hold it against you."

If he could spare the breath, Pearce would've laughed. Fisher's face swam across his vision briefly, then he withdraw again and immediately tightened the wire.

The wire snagged a little on the bars under his head, making it harder for Fisher to strangle him effectively, but perhaps that wasn't a mistake. Fisher wasn't killing him, the opposite in fact, but his lungs didn't know that.

When Fisher let up this time, the tension ran from Pearce's body like water, out of energy shockingly quickly and his breath only rattled faintly. Fisher pulled the wire away completely — it felt like it came from deep beneath his skin — then traced the furrow with his fingers.

"You'll having matching scars by the time I'm through," Fisher observed. "How romantic."

Forcing through the pain — and the reluctance of doing anything that'd make it worse — Pearce tilted his head to the side and up until he could catch and hold Fisher's gaze.

"How about you shut up?" Pearce rasped.

Fisher chuckled. "Is that bitterness?" he asked. He stepped to the side of Pearce, making it easier to face each other. In a show of indifference, he straightened the wire in his hand and Pearce had to concentrate to keep his attention from drifting to it.

"Has she gotten bored with you?" Fisher inquired sweetly.

Metal screeched loudly and Fisher snapped his head up like a rattlesnake, glowering across the room to where Denise had got to her feet. She was pale, her expression with the laxness of someone who had no strength left to keep up appearance. For a moment, she seemed like she was about to sit back down and pretend nothing had happened, but then she said, "Do I have to be in the room?"

Fisher frowned. "What? You're disappointed? I know it's just a little bit of strangulation and…"

Denise swallowed, gaze darting around the room, looking for escape, but she found some remnant calm to put into her voice. "I have work to do," she said. "I can't just sit around and wait on you like this. I'll be in the office, when you're ready. When… he… is ready."

Fisher quirked an eyebrow. "Your loss," he said shrugging.

Released, Denise snapped the laptop closed and hurried for the door without any other look at Pearce or Fisher. Pearce used the moment to turn his head and catch a glimpse of the outside while the door was open. He was in a side-room of a warehouse, staked boxes on long rows of shelves, but mostly in darkness making the size hard to judge.

The door swung closed behind Denise, but Pearce heard the faintest thud against the wall by the door. Fisher realigned the wire with his throat, painful on the already tender skin, even before he applied any pressure. Pearce felt his body lock up in anticipation, but unlike Fisher, he had had time to spot someone reaching for the door from outside to keep it from falling closed.

After that, the wire bit down again and he seemed to withstand it for a shorter duration each time, nudging him quicker and closer to unconsciousness. From very far away, he heard a low curse and the distinct sound as a gun was cocked.

"Let go right now!"

It took longer, infinitely longer, before the cutting pressure of the wire was lifted. He sensed Fisher taking a step away from him, perhaps raise his arms, but while he let go of the wire, it still sat deeply buried in his skin, making breathing difficult and painful.

Pearce blinked, shook his head to reorient himself and loosen the wire.

"Would you look at that," Fisher remarked. He was walking around the chair, Pearce heard his footsteps and their rhythm was alarming. He forced his head to the side, spotted Mia with her gun raised, gazed fixed on Fisher. A loose scarf only partially obscured her face, allowed him to see her angrily bared teeth. She edged back from Fisher's slow approach and even Pearce wasn't quite sure if Fisher was just trying to make for the door or if he wanted to attack her.

"Who's this cutie?" Fisher asked and had the audacity to glance at Pearce, leaving Mia out of his sight. "Maybe you were the one who got bored, after all."

But it was just a distraction, because he had barely finished speaking before he launched himself at Mia. In the constraints of the small room, he had a good chance to get at her before she could shoot him. He lunged for her wrist and got a grip on her, yanked the gun up where it was harmless to him, but he had no chance to avoid Mia's low stab into his side, pointed fingers right into his kidney. Fisher flinched away and she snapped her arm out of his grip, but before she had a chance to bring it to bear, Fisher smashed an elbow into her side, doubling her over and knocking her into the wall.

Rather than press the advantage, he used the chance to dart through the door and dip into the shadow of the warehouse.

Mia took one step after him, then stopped and turned back to Pearce.

"Holy shit," she muttered. She kept the open door in her sight as she approached him. "How bad is it?" she asked.

Pearce tried and failed to take adeep breath, opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything, the strain against his vocal cords warned him off, but Mia had got the pointed. Carefully, she lifted the wire from his throat and only then did Pearce allow himself to relax a little.

"I'll survive," he croaked. "Just get me out of this chair. Never liked the dentist."

The remark caused a small, automatic smile to flit across Mia's tense features. She glanced down over the cuffs, then looked around the bare room. "Uh, I hope there are keys somewhere."

"Don't worry," Jordi said from the doorway. Mia snapped the gun up at him, but relaxed when she recognised who it was. Jordi surveyed the room, leaned a shoulder into the doorway and brandished a bolt cutter. "None of the guys had any keys on them, but this'll do, I'm sure. You can fill the rest of the evening by picking them in peace."

Mia blinked in surprise. "Is everyone down?" she asked.

"Well, _no,_ " Jordi said. "You can't storm a place like this with one and a half adept people and expect no one to get away, but I'm sure we've got the place to ourselves for a few minutes until they get around to calling backup."

He detached himself from the doorway and stepped into the room, he aimed the bolt cutter's tip at Pearce's face.

"You," he said. "Don't deserve my help. You deleted the hacks."

He bent down and set the bolt cutter on the chains. "I should leave you in your mess, but I thought, I'll give you another chance."

The chain snapped open. Jordi continued, "You're going to share the hacks with me, just so we're clear." He walked around the chair. Cut the chain on the feet. "That's the price for this little intervention."

He put the cutter to the last chain, paused and met Pearce's gaze.

"Deal?" he asked lightly.

Pearce didn't answer immediately, but then nodded. Jordi wasted no more time and cut the last chain.

Finally freed, Pearce sat up, expected the world to spin for a moment and it did. He didn't let it show, though, and slipped to his feet with as much refinement in his movement as he could muster.

Mia forestalled him, slipped out the door in front of him, armed and much better suited to be the vanguard, but before Pearce followed her, he picked up the bolt cutter in case he needed a weapon on the way out.

Denise lay unconscious in the hallway by the door, where Mia or Jordi had left her. Pearce picked up her laptop as he walked past. He didn't expect to find much useful on it, but he preferred to make sure.

They passed by several dead or unconscious Club soldiers, depending on whether they'd crossed Mia's or Jordi's path.

The fresh, cold air and morning light outside hit Pearce like an oncoming train and he almost stumbled, briefly had to use the bolt cutter as a crutch to keep him on his feet. Mia noticed and stopped, hovered uncertainly, about to say something, about to ask if he was alright, but she thankfully thought better of it. She'd only force him to lie about it badly and she knew him well enough to know that.

Jordi's sympathy, if there was any, took the form of a car key, shoved into Pearce's limp hand.

"I'll be in touch about those hacks," Jordi said as he walked away to his car parked across from the car-park in front of the warehouse.

Pearce hit the unlock button and on the other end of the car-park, a car's headlights flared up as it unlocked.

When they reached the car, Pearce dropped the bolt cutter to a loud clank on the asphalt. He padded Mia's back and gave her a very gentle shove to the left side of the car, picked up her hand and put the key in it.

"You drive."

The synthetic seats of the car were unreasonably welcoming, luring him to let his sore body fall into it, while Mia took the car to the road. He felt her glance pass over him for the first few minutes, before she seemed reassured and concentrated on driving.

Though, his body felt leaden, he wasn't willing to let things go. Trying to remember what had happened before he regained consciousness in the warehouse seemed useless. Whatever drug Heather had slipped him, it had taken care of that and he couldn't make much sense of the disjected parts he did remember. What she had said later was far more interesting. If asking about the mole was the wrong question, then what was the correct one?

"Pearce?" Mia asked. "Where are we going? Morrsky?"

"The Fulten River safe-house," he said after a moment.

"Where you kept Heather? I don't know what it is, but 'safe' isn't one of them."

"We have to dismantle it."

"Tonight? Really?"

He just grunted an affirmative and Mia dropped it.

The mole wasn't relevant for Heather. Someone had schemed against her by revealing her location to her would-be assassins and she didn't care about it. He set his elbow against the side of the door and rubbed his forehead with his hand. She wasn't the forgiving type, so it was because the mole didn't matter for another reason.

"How did you know what happened?" he asked, breaking the silence.

"I was already home, but I was still thinking about what happened at Kenneth Quinn's place," she explained. "But I couldn't get you on the phone."

"Plenty of reasons for that."

"Yeah," she agreed. "I didn't think anything was wrong then, but I drove back to the hideout, I thought I could check out my theory. You see, it irks me that I saw the issue with the looped video and didn't realise what it was. There must be a way to detect a recording masquerading as a live feed… Anyway, when I checked in with Heather, she wasn't there. And I still couldn't get you on the phone, so that was a bit much coincidence for me, so I looked at the recordings."

She reached into her pocket and handed him her phone. "And there was this email from Ramsey."

He took the phone from tabbed his way to the dead drop inbox he'd installed for Ramsey.

**From:** _EADA Ramsey_

**Subject:** _Mole_

**Message:** _I have conducted intensive interviews with all members of my team, not only field agents but also all people who work on the case. I had my doubts about the presence of a mole among them from the start and none of these interviews have changed my opinion. I am now convinced none of them have willingly given information to the Club, neither in Heather Quinn's case, nor in any other._

_However, during the interviews, some members of Quinn's PSD have revealed to me that they would sometimes let her use their cellphones to make calls. It is highly irregular, but after having spoken with Quinn myself extensively, I understand she can be persuasive. I am not entirely sure what to make of this information, but I suspect Heather herself was responsible for the breach in security._

_In conclusion, while my team was responsible for the attack, it was not because of corruption. It would be prudent at this point, to return Quinn to me. It will be difficult enough to prevent the case from being picked apart, considering the highly dubious circumstances surrounding much of it._

Pearce lowered the phone and looked out the window, watched the city pass by outside, the familiar shapes of the Loop's high-rise skyline.

"What do you think it means?" Mia asked.

"What's your guess?" he asked quietly.

"I'm not sure," Mia said. "Heather was communicating with someone outside, but she almost got killed in the hit, that can't have been her plan and what I saw from that place? Never in a million years was that fake. Whoever did it really wanted her dead."

"You're right," he said. "The hit was real."

But all the rest had been fake. He had thought Heather's selectiveness in what she revealed to Ramsey was just her attempt to salvage what she could from a bad situation, but if he looked at it from a different angle, then Heather became someone who took on a very risky gamble.

He felt Mia's gaze on him again, but she waited a long time for him to speak without prompting. When he didn't, she said, "How does it all fit together? I don't get it."

He sighed, but the weight remained on his chest. "I have a theory, but it only works if two assumptions are," he said. "One, Iain loves Heather, and two, Heather is smart enough to plan on that scale."

"And then?"

"Then," he spoke with slow deliberation. "Then, Iain never let himself be blackmailed by me, but went to Heather the moment I approached him. Heather decides to use me and Ramsey to destroy all parts of the Chicago South Club who oppose her. But there's no way for Ramsey to get at Kenneth, the way she's set things up for him, nothing would stick, he's always at least one step removed from the dirt."

He paused. The cityscape slowly changed as the left the Loop behind. He observed with detachment as his mood darkened with every part of the puzzle that fell into place. Heather needed _him_ to go after Kenneth, she needed to get close to him and with the hit on her safe-house, she had achieved exactly that. He should've noticed the change in her behaviour, but he'd put it down to the shock of nearly being killed and the constant pain from her wounds. She was no hardened fighter, she wasn't familiar with death in this way. It had worked, but only because it played to his own preconception.

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that Heather had let the hit happen. She had fed Kenneth information through Iain and staked her life on Pearce's ability to interfere fast enough to save. It took more than guts to do it.

"Uh, Pearce?" Mia interrupted.

His voice scratched harshly in his throat, "Heather gambled high and she won high."

It took a moment for Mia to catch up to him, she said, "You think she set it all up? Even the hit?" She thought about it and added, "That's crazy."

"Heather thinks she can control everything. And you said it yourself, she was pissed with Iain."

"And then she got you to go after her husband?" Mia asked. "But she couldn't know it'd work."

Pearce took another breath, going through the events in his mind, groping in the adrenaline-fuelled memories for a thread to follow. He had to laugh, thinking it through now. It was hard not to be impressed by Heather's planning. She'd made a few mistakes along the way, because she was juggling too many variables, but Kenneth and the trap was sheer brilliancy.

"That was a win-win for her," he said. "Either I die, or Kenneth does. If I'd died, she'd have spun it another way. It was all a ruse to take me down, Kenneth isn't stupid enough to pass up the fame. I'm sure she had a plan for getting rid of Ramsey after I was out of the picture."

He could almost hear Mia think in the silence, irritating against the muffling cloud invading his thoughts. He picked his head out of his hand and pushed it into the headrest.

Dismissively, he finished, "But that's just a theory."

* * *

The cameras in the former hideout were off and the rig didn't respond to Mia's phone. Pearce had suspected Heather would try to secure it, but it was equally possible she'd decided to go into hiding the moment she heard he'd got free. 

Parked a street away, Pearce used Mia's phone and the ctOS cameras to survey the surrounding of the house. A car was parked a little too close to it and when Pearce ran the plate it turned out to be registered to a known Club member, an associate of Carl Herrick's.

"What are you looking at?" Mia asked. Nudging his arm into a new position, she worked to pick the last handcuff.

He gestured with the phone and she fell silent. Through the camera, Pearce watched as a man left the building and stopped by the door to light himself a cigarette. After a few drags, he pulled out his phone, typed and sent a text. Pearce locked into the phone.

_(Where the hell are you guys? I can't carry this shit alone.)_

It took a few minutes until he received an answer. _(Stay put. Got some problems here. We get to you.)_

The man punched his fist into the doorway out of frustration, then finished his cigarette and went back in.

Pearce logged out of ctOS and handed the phone back. He bent forward and opened the glovebox to find the gun Jordi had left there.

She took it, but her gaze drifted away from his face. She frowned. "What's that on your neck?"

"Huh?"

He flexed his neck, but other than the stiffness he expected, nothing seemed wrong.

"Looks weird, more like a blurry tattoo than a bruise..."

It clicked through his mind, one painful second at a time, leaving him cold to the bone. He took the phone back out of Mia's unresisting fingers and ran a search on the old tracking signal. The phone picked it up immediately. Scrambling the tracker wasn't hard, making it stick was the problem, especially if the Club had upgraded the devices. He clenched his teeth and resolved to take care of it later.

"Not a tattoo," Mia concluded.

"Club used to nano tracking devices to mark their merchandise," he explained, he rubbed his forehead, gathering his thoughts. "Alright, one thing at a time," he said and looked at Mia. "You'll need to get rid of this car," he told Mia. "Find something with a trunk and bring it to the house."

Mia eyed him and frowned, "Are you sure it's safe?"

Bracing himself for the effort he knew it was going to take, Pearce opened the door and pulled himself to his feet, laid an arm along the door to lean back down and meet Mia's skeptical gaze.

"It's safe," he said. "Just don't waste time."

He slapped the door closed and stepped back from the car, watched it drive off while he put the gun into the waistband of his jeans, pulled the shirt over it.

The short walk to the safe-house in the cold was good for his head and put his senses back on the edge. For the first time, he felt truly awake again.

The former warehouse had only one exit. It was only halfway converted yet, more units were planned to be added, but right now the only way to leave and avoid the door would be to go right through the wall.

Approaching the front door, Pearce didn't slow down. He spared the broken lock only a passing glance as he pushed the door open. Speed was key, giving his enemy no chance to react. He guessed the man was lounging around on the couch, bored out of his mind rather than alert because he'd been kept in the dark.

The door was bent out shape and resisted him a little, advertising his approach, but by then he was already in the room. He'd been right, the man was on the couch, his gun and feet up on the table. By the time, he'd got one feet down and reached for the gun, Pearce was already on him. He kicked the gun out of his hand and tackled him into the couch. Pearce snatched a cushion, pressed it into the struggling man's face, drew the gun. He pushed the barrel deep into the cushion before he pulled the trigger.

The bang of the shot was still audible, but he didn't think it would cause too much attention in the general noise of the construction work. Mostly, the cushion was there to shield him from the splatter of blood.

The man went limp instantly and Pearce climbed off him. He was breathing harder than he should after such a small exertion, but he'd chalk that up to the drugs still in his system.

Looking around the room, he spotted his rig in a varying degree of dismantlement. Someone had started to unplug the network, but lost interest halfway through, probably when he'd taken that smoke-break before. He found one of his replacement phones in the bottom drawer of the desk and pocketed it.

His coat lay over a stool by the bar counter and he walked over to it. He saw the bag with the wine and vodka he'd brought Heather, one of the last clear memories he had.

He checked out the bedroom and bath, just in case he'd missed anyone, but other than his bloodstained sweater, his gun and baton, there was nothing there. He returned to the kitchen, put the phone on the counter and opened the vodka, picked a drinking glass because it was behind the first cabinet he tried.

The alcohol burned down his throat, he briefly questioned the wisdom of drinking, but he suspecvted it had already caused all the trouble it could.

After a while, he reached for the phone and dialled Ramsey's number.

_"Ramsey."_

He had to clear his throat before he trusted it to speak, there was nothing he could do about the hoarseness. The pain, he just ignored.

"If I give you everything I have on Heather Quinn, could you use it?"

To his credit, Ramsey didn't take long to figure out who was calling and he seemed to even be giving the option some thought before he said, _"That's not as easy to answer as you think. The information you give me, it's almost certainly illegally obtained, so that makes it difficult to tackle. Hands the defence many arguments on a silver platter."_ He paused for a moment. _"Why would you do that? What happened?"_

"Do you about Kenneth Quinn?"

_"Of course. Did you have something to do with it?"_

Pearce didn't answer immediately, considered what Ramsey would do with the truth if he told it. Finally, he said, "Heather's gone. I can find her, but you'll have to get her yourself. She'll be ready for me."

_"How do I 'get' her?"_

"You arrest her," Pearce said, stating the obvious.

_"What do I charge her with?"_ Ramsey's tone was impatient, bordering on condescending.

"What if I made everything public?"

_"Absolutely not. I cannot tell you what'd happen then. It'd be a nightmare of prejudicial publicity and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't do it."_

Pearce considered and allowed the silence to stretch uncomfortably, made worse by the absence of sight. "Protective custody," he finally said.

_"How so?"_

"If I release this information, Heather Quinn's life will be in danger from several members of her own organisation. And if they don't get her, I will."

_"Just to be clear, you are threatening to kill her?"_

"Yes."

Ramsey was silent again, but only briefly. He made a small sound in his throat and then said, _"I can work with that."_

"I'll let you know where she is soon."

He hung up the phone and tossed it aside, watched as it slid along the counter and came to a rest precariously close to the edge, just before it tipped over.

He settled his elbows on the counter and let his head hang down, tension in his neck and shoulders and all the way down his spine. He slipped to a stool and dropped his head in a hand. Idly, he stirred two finger through the vodka and traced the gash on his cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I get the distinct impression Aiden's not really having a good time in this one. I feel like I owe him something nice now… not sure I know how to do nice, though. No one wants to see 3k words of Aiden getting drunk while watching sports, right? 


End file.
